Copy of Michelangelo's tomb sculpture

Bernhard Bleeker began studying with Wilhelm Rümann at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1899. In 1903 he met his teacher's greatest rival - Adolf von Hildebrandt. The author of the theory of modern classicism was regarded as the most important German Roman (Deutsch-Römer) next to Hans von Marées. Bleeker came to the Eternal City in 1909 to measure the sculpture of Mojżesz [Moses] from the tomb of Julius II by Michelangelo (1516). Helmut Toepffer of Szczecin commissioned him to reproduce the marble statue in view of a collection of copies of Renaissance art being created for the building of the local City Museum. At the same time, and on the same budget, the WMF Geislingen produced a galvanoplastic reproduction of the Venetian Colleoni statue of Andrea del Verrocchia (1496). All these contacts were made possible by the Dohrn family of Szczecin, who, with copies and reconstructions of ancient Greek sculptures, formed the core of the city's collection. On the initiative of the Dohrns, the Munich-based Walter Riezler, a monographer of Hildebrandt and Marées, and above all a classical archaeologist, was also brought in and became director of the museum in 1910. By redirecting the institution's interests towards modern art, he misappropriated the ideas of the two Szczecin families. Colleoni stood in the dome room, but when the copy of Moses came out of Bleeker's workshop, Riezler did not enter it in the inventory. In 1911, Toepffer placed the marble monument in his own residence in Finkenwalde (Szczecin-Zdroje), where it survived the Second World War. In 1948, the Provincial Committee for the Reconstruction of the Capital in Szczecin donated both monuments to Warsaw. Ironically, the museum Colleoni was placed in Szczecin's Lotników Square in 2002, while 13 years later the restored Mojżesz was included in the collection of the local museum for the first time.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak