Skip to main content
14.08.2024

From 14 August to 10 November 2024, Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg's Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps (a.k.a. the Artillery Museum) offer The Pretender's Armour exhibition at the Arsenal pavilion in the Alexander Park.

The exhibition showcases the beautifully decorated arm and leg pieces of an early seventeenth-century armour set made for the False Dmitry, a.k.a. Dmitry I, the ill-fated tsar of Russia who falsely claimed to be Ivan the Terrible’s lost youngest son. After only 11 months of rule from June 1605 to May 1606, members of the Russian nobility (boyars) assassinated him and shot the ashes of his body out of a cannon.

Such ceremonial armour sets took time to produce, therefore the short-reigned Dmitry unlikely had a chance to wear it. There even were doubts that the set was finished by the time of Dmitry's death.

In 1868, the arm and leg pieces were found by chance at a Paris antiques dealer's by Egor Kemmerer, then the curator of the Arsenal at Tsarskoe Selo. He was the first to tie the find to the False Dmitry, taking into account the armour plates' production time, size, and decoration with heraldic elements of tsarist eagles and Moscow State coats of arms on the pauldrons (shoulder guards), vambraces (forearm guards), couters (elbow guards), and cuisses (thigh guards) with poleyns (a.k.a. genouilleres, knee guards).

Prompted by Kemmerer, Russian diplomat and art collector Alexander Basilewsky (1829–99) bought the pieces and presented them to Emperor Alexander II in 1870 as great additions to the latter's arms and armour collection at the Arsenal of Tsarskoe Selo. Years later, the pieces ended up in the Artillery Museum.

Apparently completed and sold out separately after the False Dmitry's death, the other pieces of the set—the chest and back plates of the cuirass and the helmet—were identified in the 1980s and 2022 among the objects from the former collection of George F. Harding Jr. handed over to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1982. Harding (1868-1939) was a Chicago-based businessman and state senator with an extensive collection of fine art and artefacts in his own Harding Museum, for which he probably purchased the Dmitry's armour pieces in Europe at one of the sales of the armoury of the wealthy Polish-Lithuanian Radziwill family.