Article content continued

The greatest Russian museums have a tradition of exhibiting stolen art, to the distress of the descendants of collectors who have to pay admission to see the symbols of the money their great-grandparents didn’t get a chance to leave them. Visitors to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, for instance, can see a beautiful collection of paintings from Picasso’s Cubist period. They were collected by once-rich Russians who spent the winter in France, then took their purchases home just in time for the Bolsheviks to acquire them on the what’s-yours-is-ours principle.

When they dealt with Germany, the Soviets made an exception. After 1945, when East Germany became a satellite of the Soviet Union, Moscow was overcome by the spirit of communist brotherhood and returned much of the booty, maybe a million recently captured items.

Presumably the Russians forgot Berlin’s Renaissance sculptures or misfiled them or figured Berlin might not want them back — some were in wretched condition, having come twice through fires that resulted from bombing in 1945.

The Bode Museum’s lost collection lay apparently forgotten until 2005, when German and Russian curators began wondering what had survived. Last year, the research team revealed that a damaged piece by Donatello (a bronze depicting John the Baptist) could be restored. The further “discovery” of the remaining 59 sculptures was called a “sensational find” by art scholars.

Over the last six decades the Moscow curators haven’t spent a lot of time repairing this particular cache of fine art. According to Neville Rowley, curator of Italian Renaissance art at the Bode Museum, “They can’t currently be shown because of the state they are in. Some are even in fragments.” Beside Donatello, the sculptors represented include artists such as Luca della Robbia and Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. There are plans to exhibit the sculptures at the Pushkin Museum once they’re restored. Could be 2019.