The Sistine Madonna, taken from Dresden

On 14 May 1945, six days after Soviet forces entered Dresden, a Red Army officer arrived at a railway tunnel near Pirna in Saxony. The Sächsische Zeitung reports that he was Lieutenant Leonid Rabinovich, a stage painter from Kyiv serving in the 164th battalion, and that an employee of the Dresden sculpture collection led him there. Only one crate was loaded that day. It held Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, and it went to the battalion’s quarters at the Dresden abattoir. The paper says he was probably the first to touch it.

Who found the painting is disputed. Russian accounts credit Rabinovich with finding a store at a quarry near Großcotta, and some give Königstein. Current Time, the Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe, notes that the Moscow trophy brigade led by Natalya Sokolova reached Dresden only on 14 May. It says Rabinovich joined that brigade on 17 May, after the Madonna had been found. CODART, an art-history network, cites Uta Neidhardt: German museum staff told the Soviet search teams where the stores were.

The painting is 269.5 by 201 centimetres, oil on canvas, made about 1512 to 1513 for Pope Julius II. It hung over the high altar of the church of San Sisto in Piacenza until it was bought for Augustus III of Saxony in the early 1750s. It reached Dresden on 1 March 1754. In the war the Dresden gallery first stored it in the Albrechtsburg at Meissen. The Sächsische Zeitung says the gallery director judged that castle unsafe from bombs. On 15 December 1943 the painting went into the tunnel, about 260 metres long and covered by up to 20 metres of earth and rock, in an insulated wagon. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), the city’s state museums, says the stored works took no significant harm before May 1945.

Soviet trophy brigades gathered the Dresden pictures at Pillnitz Palace. The SKD says that from July 1945 they were sent to the Soviet Union as compensation for Soviet losses, with no plan to return them. The Madonna left in late July with about 600 other paintings and reached the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in August. Die Welt reports that Marshal Konev feared a copy, because the painting is unsigned. Soviet experts said it was genuine. Andrei Chegodaev, a Pushkin Museum curator, wrote that from 1948 or 1949 the rooms were closed to nearly all visitors.

Whether the painting was restored in Moscow is disputed. The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine says it was badly damaged in the war and restored in Moscow between 1945 and 1955. The SKD object record says the Soviet condition record made in Moscow in 1955 shows no restoration in the Soviet Union. The SKD historian Thomas Rudert, quoted by the Sächsische Zeitung, calls the restoration claim part of a rescue story built in East Germany. The SKD calls the idea that the Red Army saved the works a legend. It says they were taken as trophies.

The New York Times reported that on 30 March 1955 the Soviet government announced it would return 750 Dresden pictures to East Germany, the Madonna among them. They were first shown in Moscow from 2 May 1955. Irina Antonova, then a Pushkin Museum researcher, put the attendance at about 1.2 million over about four months. It then went to Berlin. The SKD record dates its return to Dresden to 1956. The rebuilt Semper gallery reopened on 3 June 1956. The original frame did not come back, and the present frame is a modern copy. The Sistine Madonna hangs in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.