Mato Celestin Medović
Heather, 1911
oil on canvas
58.3 x 81.4 cm
MG-328
In 1868, Mato Celestin Medović (1857–1920) entered the Monastery of the Friars Minor in Dubrovnik with the intention of becoming a priest. Having noticed his painting talent, the Franciscan Minister General invited him to Rome to study painting. Between 1880 and 1886, Medović received unsystematic education in Italy, where he returned for additional training in 1894. He visited Rome, Assisi, Fuccechio, Faenza, Cesena and Florence, where he attended Antonio Ciseri’s private school during a nine-month period from July 1883 to April 1884. He subsequently enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1888 to 1893, where he studied decorative history painting under professors Gabriel Hackl, Ludwig Löfftz and Alexander Wagner. This is where he executed his famous painting the Bacchanal, 1893. He lived in Vienna from 1912 to 1914, where in 1913 he staged a solo exhibition. Although he was invited, he did not join Bukovac and the young artists at the pivotal exhibition of the Croatian Salon in 1898.
The painting Heather, 1911 belongs to Medović’s final landscape phase from the period 1908–1920, when he dedicated himself to painting the landscapes of his native Pelješac. Painted in plein air, with a dotted, divisionist technique devoid of its original symbolic background, this composition in blue and purple is an example of unrestrained realism of Medović’s native landscape painting.
Text: PhD Ivana Rončević Elezović, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb