650th Anniversary of the Birthday of Andrei Rublev
An evening was held in the Andrei Rublev Central Museum of Old Russian Culture and Art on the 10th of January dedicated to the 650th anniversary of the birth of the icon painter, and the 50th anniversary of the museum.
Intermingled with emotionally powerful operatic singing to a background of a wall of icons, various dignitaries such as Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov, the director of the Tagansky Theatre commented on the importance of the museum. He commented that the museum provides: “medicine for the soul.” Gennadi Victorovich Popov, the director of the museum, commented that the museum complex is one of the oldest architectural sites in Moscow, and that it continues to attract large numbers of people. Lev Lifshits, the head of the museum’s art department, said: “what we see here [in this museum] is what constitutes our Russian culture in it’s naked form. All of our [Russian] culture from the middle-ages has been restored relatively recently, and a lot of the work has been done here.”
The museum itself is well worth a visit. Housed inside the Andronikov Monastery, which was founded in the 14th century, the museum houses a massive collect of icons gathered from central and northern Russia, painted from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Despite the fact that Andrey Rublev’s name is used in the name of the museum, there are none of his famous icon’s in the museum’s collection. This, however, is the place where the icon painter worked and spent most of his life. The Cathedral of The Saviour built at the start of the 15th century, within the walls of the monastery was decorated by Rublev.
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