The Museum of Casts

The museum of Casts of world-famous sculptures organized in his time by I.V.Tsvetayev for educating university students, and so named after him, was re-opened June 30, 1997 as a department of the Pushkin Museum and also of the Museum Center of Russia's University of Humanities. It takes seven rooms containing 750 copies of famous sculptural masterpieces of ancient Egypt, Middle East, Greece and Rome, medieval and Renaissance Europe, possessed by the best museums of Paris, London, Berlin, Cairo, St.Petersburg, and other museums of Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries.
The exhibits acquaint art students and the general public with the main periods of world art from ancient times to the XVI century. Among them are copies of the great statue of Pharaoh Chephren, the reliefs of Khesir's tomb, one of the Tanis sphinxes of Ammenemkhet III, the Babylonian column inscribed with the Hammurabi Code, the reliefs of the Assyrian palaces, samples of the sculptural decor of the Athenian Parthenon, sculptural portraits of Sophocles and Demosthenes, and other notable works.

Room of the Art of Middle Ages and Renaissance

The samples of classical art are arranged in specially designed rooms decorated with copies of ancient wall paintings. The copied relics of the middle ages and Renaissance are placed in the central hall modeled on the atrium of a Roman house dedicated to the memory of the patron of arts A.L.Shanyavsky who was the founder of the first People's University in Moscow.
The exhibits of this department do not repeat (with a few exceptions) original works displayed in the main building of the Museum. On the other hand, this teaching collection fills some art history gaps in the main exposition: Egyptian sculpture, Attic tombs of the IV century b.c., Byzantine and Roman bone carving, Northern Renaissance sculpture.
Most of the exhibits presented here come from the Museum's first collection created at the turn of the XX century by the efforts of its founder I.V.Tsvetayev, plus some copies from the still earlier small collection which had belonged to Moscow University (made in the 1850s-80s), also from the Roumyantsev Museum (1862), and some other sources.
The department of copies is open to the general public, but it is mostly used for students' classes, thus restoring Tsvetayev's tradition of the Museum's close link with the teaching process.