When Renaissance sculptor Donatello’s legendary work, St John the Baptist, arrived at the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow, it was missing both feet, one arm and part of a cape. Many thought it was beyond repair. The sculpture had survived two separate instances of fire while in storage at a bunker in the Berlin suburbs in 1945, when the Second World War was nearing its end.
The museum found a plaster copy made before the war, which served as a reference to resurrect St John the Baptist.
That same bunker also held priceless artefacts that had been transported from what is now known as the Bode Museum in Berlin, to avoid damage during the war.
