The Central Andrei Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art is the only state museum of ancient Russian art and modern-era Russian church art.
The museum was established by government decree in 1947, thanks to the involvement of outstanding researchers, restorers, and cultural professionals, including the academician Dmitry Likhachev, Pyotr Baranovsky, and Ilya Ehrenburg. Pyotr Baranovsky, a renowned architect and restorer, discovered that the great icon painter Andrei Rublev had been buried on the territory of the Andronikov Monastery of the Savior. This discovery led to the establishment of the museum, which was created to preserve the monastery’s architectural ensemble and to perpetuate the memory of Andrei Rublev.
Initially, the museum did not have a collection of its own. The monastery’s artistic treasures had been looted, and only a few artifacts had survived, which had been taken away and included in the collections of other museums. The museum’s founders and first employees dedicated their work to collecting artifacts of religious art during Soviet times and saw their mission as preserving the treasures of national culture for future generations.
Nowadays, the main collection features over 20,000
artifacts dating from the 11th to the early 20th centuries. It includes icons, handwritten and printed books, works of graphic
art, frescoes, and monuments of decorative and applied arts, as well as wooden statues
and white stone carvings. The collection presents a comprehensive overview of
the artistic legacy of ancient Russia.
