“Cats of the Hermitage”, or Do not throw a stone at the “Mona Lisa”

I looked the other day funny animated film by Vasily Rovensky “Cats of the Hermitage”, which unexpectedly prompted interesting, but not at all funny thoughts.

The main theme of this cartoon, hiding behind the funny collisions of the characters, is connected with a serious problem – vandalism against works of world art.

According to the script, the main characters – the cat Vincent (not Van Gogh, but he respects painting), together with the mouse Maurice, almost drowned during the flood. The friends were saved by the fact that they hid in an old wooden harpsichord, which was caught by the efforts of the sailors and delivered to St. Petersburg. In the Hermitage, where the instrument ends up, Vincent meets members of the feline elite – the famous detachment that has been protecting masterpieces of painting from mice for centuries. But Vincent remembers well that it was the mouse Maurice who saved his life. The mouse friend needs to be hidden from the watchful cats of the Hermitage, but Maurice, like all rodents, loves to gnaw on the masterpieces of world art. And then the famous painting “Mona Lisa” arrives in the Hermitage…

Sitting in the hall and watching the characters’ efforts to harm the Mona Lisa, I reflected on the fact that the mice in the animation project are very similar to people who, “for ideological reasons”, are trying to damage the world’s masterpieces.

Here are the facts: a little more than a century ago (it just happened in March), in the London National Gallery, a certain Marie Richardson chopped up Velasquez’s painting “Venus with a Mirror” with a meat chopper. The lady, who considered herself a suffragist and, apparently, really wanted to go down in history, forever linking herself with the goddess she desecrated. But, unlike the mice in the cartoon, she also insisted that her vandalistic aspirations were not dictated by personal ambitions, not by envy of the beauty of the other fair sex, but by the desire to get voting rights on an equal basis with men.

It is not clear, however, one thing – why she did not chop up the statue of some Roman patrician with a hammer? But female logic is a vague thing and cannot be analyzed.

However, the logic of men is not subject to analysis in this case either: literally a year before the events described in our Tretyakov Gallery, a certain Abram Balashov, imbued with pacifist ideas, brandishing an instrument of retaliation and shouting “Down with blood!” literally shredded Repinsky’s “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan.”

It is curious that such “socially affirming” ideas turned around in history most often against the works of the great Rembrandt – a circumstance that requires separate reflection. The works of the great Dutchman, as if smeared with honey, attracted crazy people of all calibers for centuries. So, for example, in the same Hermitage 38 years ago, a certain Bronius Maigis, a Lithuanian avenger, mutilated Rembrandt’s Danae, citing “fair political” retribution.

And the Night Watch in Amsterdam has been repeatedly stabbed and doused with acid since 1900.

Well, now, in fact, to the Mona Lisa. Not on an animated screen, but in reality, a painting from the Louvre “for political reasons” suffered four times at the hands of vandals. First there was a certain Hugo Ungaz Villegas from Bolivia, overwhelmed with righteous anger, who launched a stone into the picture. Then the Japanese threw a bottle of paint at the masterpiece. More than a decade ago, our compatriot, who was denied French citizenship, also tried. She threw an earthenware cup in the face of the innocent Gioconda …

It is especially surprising when the vandals try to explain their actions with “highly artistic motives.” For example, an incredibly “refined” artist from Russia, Alexander Brener, decided to go through green spray paint, inscribing a dollar sign into Malevich’s original “Suprematism”. He explained his gesture of “good will” by the fact that contemporaries should “adore” not dead artists, but living ones. What is it like?! Allow me to adore!

It is clear that world museums today, having gained bitter experience, seek to protect their collections with all modern methods: from connecting alarms to placing paintings under special glasses that are not afraid of either hammer blows or acid. But at the same time, this cannot but sadden true connoisseurs of painting: glaring glass, of course, kills all the magic of the canvas. But, alas, you can’t assign a bodyguard to every Madonna in museums …

Elena Bulova.