Art of Old Russia

Among the museum collections of Russian icon painting, the icon collection of the Russian Museum, alongside the Tretyakov Gallery and the Moscow Museum of History, has pride of place. The collection numbers more than five thousand icons from the twelfth to the early twentieth centuries. The collection of Old Russian art and craft work, sculpture and applied art stands on a par with the collections of the largest museums in Russia. It is one of the most important collections, providing a view of the development of Russian decorative and applied art over the centuries — from the ninth to the seventeenth.