Russia on Monday called for the harshest possible punishment after a visitor to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery caused serious damage by attacking a famous 19th-century painting of Ivan the Terrible. On Friday, Russian police arrested a 37-year-old man who used a metal pole to break the glass covering Ilya Repin’s painting of the 16th-century tsar killing his son, damaging the work in three places.
Russian First Deputy Minister of Culture Vladimir Aristarkhov told a news conference at the gallery on Monday that his ministry expects the man to receive “the most severe punishment possible.”
Under current law, the man faces up to three years in prison.
“Three years is nothing compared with the value of this painting,” Aristarkhov said.
“We would like to initiate a discussion on toughening up the punishment for the vandalism of art,” Tretyakov Gallery director Zelfira Tregulova added, speaking in the Repin Room of the gallery where the crime took place.
Russian media said the man — a builder named Igor Podporin — vandalized the painting for “historical reasons” and later told police he acted under the influence of alcohol after drinking a shot of vodka.
The man did not appear intoxicated and bypassed the gallery’s guards before throwing himself at the painting just before the museum closed, chief conservator Tatyana Gorodkova said.
She told journalists that museum staff heard him “say something about how Ivan the Terrible did not kill his son.”
Archival letters by Repin prove the painter did not intend for the work to be historical, but rather “psychological,” she said.
Tregulova said she feared that Russians are increasingly “not differentiating artistic work from historical facts.”
“The mixing of the two can mean that any artwork can be a victim [of an attack],” she said.
She called the act “a terrible crime against Russian and European culture” and said it exposed “unprecedented aggression” in Russian society.
“People think their point of view is the only one that is correct. They aggressively reject other points of view,” she said.
Russia has seen several less serious attacks on art by ultra-patriotic groups in recent years, with many commentators blaming state media and officials for creating an atmosphere of intolerance.
The gallery showed photographs of the damage to the painting, which has been removed from the Repin Room for the first time since it was evacuated from Moscow during World War II. The pictures showed three large marks on the tsar’s dying son. Ivan the Terrible’s face and hands, the most striking parts of the painting, were left untouched.
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