Klovićevi Dvori Gallery are featuring a retrospective exhibition by the great Croatian painter Mato Celestin Medović (1857 – 1920), a painter who had many interests and whose opus consists of a wide thematic range, from religious compositions and history painting, to still life, female portraits and modern landscape painting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was a monk and a painter, schooled in Florence, Rome and Munich, who eventually left the Franciscan order and lived in Zagreb for some time. During that phase, he painted numerous religious pieces and historic compositions in the churches of Northern Croatia. Although he also made a great impact on Croatian modern art, and he is often regarded as one of the founders of Croatian modernism, along with renowned painter Vlaho Bukovac, his contemporaries did not always understand or accept him. That is why his place in this style of art has not been precisely defined to this day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This exhibition, which represents the most extensive display of Medovic’s opus, finally removes certain prejudices about his role in Croatian modern painting. It features around two hundred works by this artist, which are on loan from many museums, monasteries and churches, as well as private collections. His monumental compositions featuring episodes from Croatian history are the crown of the exhibition. The public also has an opportunity to see his monumental piece “The Martyrs of Srijem”, which was believed to be lost until recently, and is nowadays considered one of the most beautiful works of Croatian painting of the 19th century. Unfortunately, taking pictures at exhibition is not allowed, so I scanned some reproductions from the accompanying catalogue. Click for enlargements.

Pope Pio X

First off , I wish all the readers of this blog a very happy and prosperous new year.

For the first entry in new 2012, I decided to upload recently produced promotional video of Archaeological Museum in Zadar. My city is more than 3000 years old and has very rich cultural heritage. Zadar was, along with Split and Dubrovnik, one of the centres of the development of Croatian literature. The first university of Zadar was mentioned in writing as early as in 1396 and it was a part of a Dominican monastery.

Archaeological Museum in Zadar was established in 1830. This video admittedly may encourage visitors to check its interesting collection (spanning from prehistory to the Middle Ages) but in my opinion is a little too hectic. It should have been edited differently for better experience.

I liked how this warm up drawing turned out, but for some reason I decided to tinker with it some more in PS. So, here are the results…

This is my most recent commission, oil on panel 80×60 cm.

I made some adjustments during the painting process. Of course, it is almost always the case, but this time the changes were  bigger. The chair color was actually dark grey, much like the color of the sitter’s suit, which might have made the painting look dull. I adjusted as well the height of the chair back in order to create a horizontal (top edge in line with sitter’s eyes) which crosses the (invented) vertical corner in the background. That device helps emphasize the face, which is now even more in composition’s focus. I painted the chair dark reddish color and decided to also adjust a bit the color of the sitter’s suit, so it’s on the bluish side, instead of neutral gray.
I posed the sitter this way because I wished to create strong diagonals in order to avoid static, stiff look which is more often than not evident in representational portraits like this. I hope I succeeded in balancing it with the contrived horizontals and verticals.

A new exhibition at the Royal Society’s Centre for History of Science explores the life and times of celebrated Croatian polymath Rudjer Bošković (1711 – 1787) on the 300th anniversary of his birth and 250th anniversary of his election to the Royal Society. The exhibition also shows his influence on later British scientists including Joseph Priestley, Humphry Davy and J J Thomson.

Rudjer Bošković was born in Dubrovnik in May 1711 and worked for much of his life in Rome. Amongst his other achievements he developed his own theory of forces, proposed static solutions for the reparation of the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome when cracks threatened its stability, and founded the famous Brera Observatory in Milan.

He visited the Royal Society while in London on a diplomatic mission in 1760, and was immediately elected a Fellow of the Society. Bošković was entertained by the leading scientists of the day including the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, and James Stuart, with whom he had worked on a cartographic expedition in the Papal States. Despite having only a short stay in London he continued to correspond with the Society, and to present his publications in physics and astronomy to the Society’s library. The exhibition will feature rare and unique volumes from the library of the Royal Society, including a first edition of Newton’s Optice, Bošković’s presentation copies of his own works, and a copy of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin’s Baltimore Lectures from his own library with annotations and additions.

The exhibition opens on 23 November in London and it will run until 15 February 2012.

(Source: Croatian Times)

Sotheby’s London announces 19th century European art auction in November. This painting by Croatian master Vlaho Bukovac will be auctioned off for an estimated £ 30.000 – 50.000 ($ 47.000- 80.000)

A Moment’s Distraction (73×96 cm), which was purchased from the artist by the parents of the present owner, belongs to Bukovac’s late period, when he taught at the Academy of Art in Prague. His characteristic  pointillist technique which Bukovac embraced a decade earlier is not employed here. This piece is executed using a feather light touch – the brushstrokes are very soft, particularly on lady’s face and hair, which seamlessly blend into the background. I find that limited palette like this (the piece is practically monochromatic) is perfectly suited for intimate scenes. The artist was especially fond of painting domestic scene like this: in many pieces from his Prague period the models were either his daughters and son, or even their housemaid. This lady is most probably artist’s wife as she does resemble her.

British weekly The Independent  gives an inviting story on Zadar, written by Oliver Bennet, who visited my city last week:
Why visit?
Since Ryanair started flying to this Croatian city last year, it has become a bit of a hub: a place from where to explore the Dalmatian coast and its islands.
But it’s worth delaying for a few days to explore the place itself. While Split is the biggest Dalmatian city, Zadar, with 3,000 years of history, can claim to be the original capital of Dalmatia – plus it’s also the site of the first Croatian university, and was home to the 16th-century writer, Petar Zoranic, who wrote the first Croatian novel, Planine.
Zadar’s old town is packed on to a peninsula and you can stroll around it in about an hour. Ascend to the tower of the Cathedral of St Anastasia for views over the pantiles to the sea and islands in one direction and the Velebit mountains in the other.
But this isn’t really a monument town – it’s a place to hang out. Go shopping in the little alleys of the Varos area, eat squid and drink Malvasia wine in the various konobas (taverns), leap off the quayside to swim, and finally, relax on the huge Dalmatian stones. You’ll be following the example of the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who said that Zadar quay offered the most beautiful sunset in the world.

More here

   Nenad Hančić from Germany, Duesseldorff, created a new Croatian Glagolitic font for Windows. The lower case letters of the font “Glagolica Missal DPG” are oriented on the “Missal from 1483”, the first Croatian printed book (incunabulum), while the capital letters are oriented on those of “Transit of St. Jerome”, a book printed in Croatian Glagolitic characters in the town of Senj in 1508.
However, the single letters have all been slightly modified to achieve a harmonious optical impression. In addition several letters have been adjusted for easier readability.
This font also provides various (in part up to quadruple) ligatures, as well as more special characters.
The individual letters of the font are underlined with the Latin, the Cyrillic as well the Glagolitic unicode. So nearly every Slavic text can easily be converted to the “Glagolica Missal DPG” font.
The font is dedicated to the “Association of the Friends of the Glagolica“ (Društvo prijatelja glagoljice, DPG) for their exemplary efforts regarding the research and preservation of the Glagolica.
For this reason the font has been named “Glagolica Missal DPG”.

A series of  stamps with Rudjer Bošković  (Rogerius Josephus Boscovich in Latin) that will mark 300 years of his birth will be published in 150.000 edition by the Vatican Post in Rome, Italy.

Rudjer Josip Bošković (1711 – 1787) was Croatian theologian, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, Jesuit, and a polymath from the city of Dubrovnik, who studied and lived in Italy and France.

He is famous for his atomic theory and made many important contributions to astronomy, including the first geometric procedure for determining the equator of a rotating planet from three observations of a surface feature and for computing the orbit of a planet from three observations of its position. In 1753 he also discovered the absence of atmosphere on the Moon.

His atomic theory, given as a clear, precisely formulated system utilizing principles of Newtonian mechanics inspired Michael Faraday to develop field theory for electromagnetic interaction. Other nineteenth century physicists, such as William Rowan Hamilton, Lord Kelvin, and the elasticity theorist Saint Venant stressed the theoretical advantages of the Boškovićian atom over rigid atoms. Some even claim (Nikola Tesla, among others) that Boškovićian atomism was a basis for Albert Einstein’s attempts for a unified field theory and that he was the first to envisage, seek, and propose a mathematical theory of all the forces of Nature; the first scientific theory of everything.

“If Laurana were Leonardo (…) what would art historians think about his female busts?” – asked German architect and art history professor Fritz Burger (1877-1916) in his monograph on Croatian renaissance sculptor Frane Vranjanin – known as Francesco Laurana. He was born in Vrana, near Zadar.
Laurana’s female busts, after they had been finally correctly attributed to him several decades before, by at the turn of 20th century came into the focus of interest of greatest German and French scholars. Peter Tusco, for example, called Laurana “the greatest non-Tuscan and non-Venetian sculptor active in Italy in 15th century”. John Pope Hennesy, one of the foremost authority on Italian renaissance, praised Laurana’s female busts as “some of the most sensitive achievement of the fifteenth century”.
Having lived and worked in Dalmatia, Rome, Naples, Apulia, Sicily and Provence, Laurana did not belong in any of the regional schools. He was actually a link between Italian and French courts of his time.

As I already mentioned, by the end of the 19th century Laurana came into fashion, so to say, since many of his works has been – up to that time – misattributed to other sculptors, but by the last quarter of 19th century things started to change.  Academies all over the Europe and USA begun to purchase plaster casts  of Laurana’s works. Here is a proof for that – student cast drawing (after Laurana’s bust) of Lucia Matthews. I suspect that the cast in question were made from one of the Laurana’s busts in Mellon or Frick Collection.

At the beginning of the post is Kenyon Cox’s painting of famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (from 1887). In the background is plaster cast of one of Laurana’s bust.

(The first half of this entry was taken from the academic paper of prof. dr. Ivana Prijatelj)