Sensational find in Russia

Calvatone’s Victoria was an attraction on Berlin’s Museum Island. After the Second World War, the famous sculpture was thought to have been lost. Now it has been rediscovered in Russia.

The sculpture Victoria of Calvatone from the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities, which was thought to have been lost since the end of the war, has reappeared in Russia. It was discovered in a special depot of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The 1.70 gilded bronze statue is a masterpiece of the Roman imperial period that incorporates and combines the composition and motifs of older works. The body is reminiscent of a dancing maenad from the Hellenistic period, while the head is based more on classical forms from the 5th century BC.

Based on its inscription on the globe (CIL V 4089: VICTORIAE AUG / ANTONINI ET VERI / MARCUS SATRIUS MAIOR), the figure can be dated fairly precisely to 161 to 169 AD. At that time, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus ruled Rome together. The goddess of victory on the celestial globe probably symbolized the foreign policy successes of the Roman emperors after the Parthian War. The figure was found near Calvatone near Cremona in 1836 and published for the first time a year later.

In December later, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, director of the Gemäldegalerie from 1830 to 1864, bought it for the sculpture collection of the Royal Museum in Berlin, where it arrived in the spring of 1842. In 1939, like many other museum objects, it was moved to the Neue Reichsmünze on Molkenmarkt for protection. Since the end of the war, it was considered lost and was also published in the catalog of losses of the Antikensammlung – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2005). Only its removal by Russian trophy brigades was documented.

It was only recently that the Victoria could be identified. In the course of museum-historical research and conservation analyses, Russian experts succeeded in correctly reassigning the object and publishing it as a cultural asset relocated from the Berlin museums as a result of the war. Since its arrival at the Hermitage in 1946, the sculpture had been classified in the department for French sculpture of the XVII century.

The Victoria of Calvatone is to be restored in a German-Russian collaboration

Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and the General Director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, agreed to work together on the sculpture scientifically and to restore it. Hermann Parzinger thanked his Russian colleagues for their transparent research: “The Hermitage and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin have been in good professional contact for years and have successfully realized numerous joint exhibition projects, including those relating to cultural assets displaced as a result of the war, most recently the exhibition ‘Bronze Age – Europe without Borders’. Now this scientific cooperation on the sculpture of Victoria of Calvatone will set another milestone in this excellent and trusting collaboration.”