A famous work by Russian realist painter Ilya Repin was vandalized by a visitor at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery on May 25.
Ivan The Terrible And His Son Ivan On November 16th, 1581, a painting dating from 1885, was seriously damaged in the attack, in which the man used a metal fence post to smash the protection glass and rip the canvas.
"The painting is badly damaged, the canvas is ripped in three places in the central part.... The falling glass also damaged the frame," the gallery said in a statement.
"Luckily, the most valuable images, those of the faces and hands of the tsar and prince were not damaged," the statement said.
The attacker was detained and a criminal case was brought against him, the Interior Ministry reported, without revealing his identity.
Russian news agency TASS quoted an unnamed law-enforcement official as saying the perpetrator was a 37-year-old man from Voronezh, a city some 525 kilometers south of Moscow, who attacked the painting because of the "falsehood of the historical facts depicted on the canvas."
READ MORE: Russia's Dangerous Struggle With Obscurantism
The painting depicts Ivan the Terrible mortally wounding his son Ivan in a fit of rage, and it is considered the most psychologically intense of Repin’s paintings -- an expression of the artist's revolt against violence and bloodshed.
The painting was subjected to vandalism for the first time in 1913, when Abram Balashov, a mentally ill man, cut it with a knife in three places. Repin himself participated then in the restoration of the painting, the gallery said in its statement.
