Petar Pallavicini
(1886-1958)
Don Quixote, 1922
bronze
MG-4466

Petar Pallavicini attended the Special Sculpture and Stonemasonry School in Hořice in the Czech Republic (1905-1909) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1909-1912). He taught at the Royal Art School in Belgrade (1924-1937). He modelled original portraits of reduced forms and poetic female figures of an accentuated verticality.
Pallavicini was influenced at first by sculptor Ivan Meštrović, but by the beginning of the 1920s he developed his own style of modernised forms. The portraits that he created in that period feature a simplified form reduced to a voluminous drawing with plastically presented distinguishing features, which is observable already in his realistic A Portrait of Engineer I. Domicel from 1919. His The Beauty of Lopud from 1930, a softly modelled nude of a seated young girl, is part of his Adriatic series of lyrical female figures.
Pallavicini’s portrait of Don Quixote is stylised. Don Quixote’s elongated face bearing reduced and chiselled features rises elegantly from the derived yet synthesised form of the smooth bust, creating an anthological piece of Croatian sculpture.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb