Moses without polychromy

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Unlike the other figures, the statue of Moses that supports the pulpit’s corpus has been scraped clean right down to the wood. It was originally coated with polychromy. The statue lost its colours after it was stolen from the Art Museum of Estonia (where it had been brought for storage together with the rest of the pulpit’s parts). The thieves probably thought that if they remove the paint from the statue, they would be able to sell it for a high price on the art market as a work by Amandus Adamson. It is not known whether and how they succeeded in this. In any case, the statue found its way back to the museum in 2014 with the request to find proof of whether or not it was Adamson’s work. Naturally, the museum’s experts recognised Moses as the statue made by Ackermann that had gone missing, and it was added to the pulpit that it had once belonged to.

6 years ago