A Taste of Italy

We kindly invite you to the lecture by Tanja Trška, PhD 

A Taste of Italy: Italian Art in Croatian Private Collections (19th-20th Centuries)

which will be held on Thursday, 5 November, at 3 pm at 
University of Maribor, Faculty of Arts, Koroška cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, at lecture room 2.13

From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War, Croatian collectors nurtured a vivid interest in Italian art. The paths by which works of Italian old masters reached – or left – private collections reveal the interplay of taste, ambition and the quest for social status and (national) identity that often defined these transactions. The narratives that emerge from these connections include those of bishops and bank officials, dealers and intermediaries, experts and enthusiasts, in which celebrated names, hopeful attributions and persuasive provenances frequently counted for as much as the works themselves. Among the forces driving demand was the appeal of the Schiavoni, artists of Adriatic origin active in Italy, such as Giulio Clovio and Federico Benković, who were sought after as “national” artists.
The case studies to be discussed involve protagonists of what we would today call the art market, of various social standings. They range from Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the foremost Croatian collector of old masters, who pursued a painting attributed to Michelangelo, originating from the island of Šipan and brought to Frankfurt to be sold, and later rediscovered in the United States as a sensational new find, to the Zagreb lawyer and amateur art historian Benko Horvat, whose predominantly Italian pictures, acquired largely in the Veneto between the wars, form the only collection of its period to survive intact. His private archive of letters, photographs and handwritten annotations offers an insight into the interwar art market: Paduan antiquarians, London dealers, the dispersal of aristocratic estates, and the strategies used to circumvent Italian export controls. Acting also as an intermediary for the Association of the Friends of the Strossmayer Gallery, Horvat helped shape what Croatian collections came to hold.
By tracing the histories of individual objects and their owners, provenance research can uncover the wider networks of exchange, ambition and identity that bound Italy and Croatia across two centuries.

Tanja Trška is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she teaches BA-, MA- and PhD-level courses on Early Modern art. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and the University of Zagreb (2014). Her research interests include Old Master painting, the history of collecting and art patronage, and cultural exchanges with the Italian peninsula in the Early Modern period. She is currently a member of the research team of the project Women in Language, Literature, Visual Arts and on Film – between the East and the West (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, NextGenerationEU) and co-leader of the bilateral Slovenian–Croatian project Art Collections and Art Market in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1941) (ZRC SAZU, France Stele Institute of Art History / University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences).

The lecture will be held in English.

The lecture is organised as part of the research project Nationalisation and Musealisation of Art Collections in Slovenia in the Light of Provenance Research (J6-60106) and the research program Art in Slovenia at a Cultural Crossroads (P6-0061(B)), both of which are funded from the state budget by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS), and within the framework of the bilateral scientific research cooperation project Art Collections and the Art Market in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1918–1941 (BI-HR/25-27-044), co-funded by ARIS and the Ministry of Science, Education, and Youth of the Republic of Croatia (MZOM).