Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb / Lines of the Stone Past
Students of the Academy of Fine Arts in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum
Group exhibition of students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb created in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb and presentation of the publication "Guide to the Lapidary"
FROM THE PREFACE OF THE EXHIBITION
During 2021, the cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb began, which aims to connect these two cultural institutions on several levels.
One of the aspects of this cooperation began with the realization of a drawing workshop during the "European Days of Archaeology" event in the summer of 2021, in the Lapidarium of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, on June 18 and 20.
The main idea and guiding thought of the workshop, which was led and mentored by izv.prof.art. Gordana Bakić Vlahov, was for students to make drawings as personal interpretations and reconstructions of the exhibited monuments or to draw according to the imagination by including themes and concepts related to the everyday life of a certain historical period.
The workshop was attended by students of the Department of Painting and Teaching, the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art, and the Department of Photographic Film and New Media of the Academy of Fine Arts, as well as several alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts for whom drawing is one of the primary media of expression.
The results of the workshop were presented at the exhibition entitled "Lines of the Stone Past", which presented a variety of drawing approaches. These are primarily combinations of drawing techniques or motif selection (details, fragment transformations and collage), and some works stand out for their exceptional technical precision and execution of details.
izv.prof.art. Gordana Bakić Vlahov
GUIDE TO THE LAPIDARIUM OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM IN ZAGREB
In the courtyard of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb there is a presentation of a collection of stone monuments from the Roman period, a space known as a lapidary. Stone monuments from the Greek and Roman periods, of various content and purpose, are one of the important segments of the rich ancient collection of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb. A wider selection of this stone monumental material, systematized in several thematic units, is exhibited partly in the museum building, i.e. the Vraniczany Palace, but also largely in the courtyard of the Museum, both under the porch and in the open space.
Selected stone monuments are exhibited – milestones, honorary inscriptions, monumental statues, altars, tombstones, and sarcophagi, which, in addition to their attractiveness and historical value, are characterized by larger dimensions and considerable weight. The latter, understandably, had a decisive influence on the choice of the museum courtyard, or lapidarium, as the location of the exhibition. The Lapidarium is perhaps the most visited exhibition space of the Archaeological Museum, and contains many of our most important Roman monuments. Although all these exhibited monuments have long been published and repeatedly processed in scientific literature, these are mostly professional publications that are not easily accessible to the general public.
The awareness of the need to present this segment of the holdings to the public through a press suitable for laymen who are interested in information about each of the 90 exhibited monuments has therefore been present for a long time. Fortunately, the Archaeological Museum has been systematically publishing guides in Croatian and English for years with each segment of its permanent exhibition. Currently, all collections are included, from prehistoric, through Egyptian, ancient, numismatic to medieval, and we were just missing only one more segment of the permanent exhibition, that is the lapidarium. Printed guides in Croatian and foreign languages are one of the foundations of the offer for visitors, not only in the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, but also in every museum. It is with the guide through the lapidarium that the edition of the guide to the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum will be concluded, which thus becomes a complete publishing unit that will fully cover the need for basic publications of this type in the museum's publishing offer.
Guides to the Collections of the Permanent Exhibition is a series of editions launched by the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb in 2004 when the guides to the Prehistoric and Numismatic Collections were published. This was followed by the guides to the Egyptian Collection, the Ancient Collection and the Medieval Collection guide. The editions are not bilingual, but guides are printed separately in Croatian and English. The first edition of the Guide to the Lapidarium is in Croatian, and English is also planned to be prepared and printed in the near future. The guide is designed so that each monument has its own whole in the guide, i.e. a descriptive text that presents the monument to the readers through its iconographic and artistic aspect, with an explanation of the historical context, and with photographs and drawings, along with a list of literature for those who want to know more. At the same time, each inscription is translated from Latin and interpreted in an understandable way for readers. As already mentioned, the guide will be printed in two editions, in Croatian and in English translation, because foreign audiences regularly seek such printed content, which is why we expect a particularly high demand for the English edition. The guide is written by the curators of the Department of Antiquity, who usually work on the collection of stone monuments, and are professionally engaged in Roman epigraphy.
The novelty is that in addition to the above, we can say standard contents of such guides, the guide through the lapidarium will also show the works of students of the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Zagreb, who have been given the opportunity to interpret the monuments artistically at their own discretion, thus offering readers a contemporary and personal view of thousand-year-old monuments. We believe that such a "departure" from the usual publishing archaeological frameworks can only further enrich this publication and provide a fresh and welcome view of our heritage.
The exhibition in the Šira Gallery can be viewed during the Gallery's working hours (Mon-Fri: 6-8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.) until July 4, 2022.
The exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, and with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media and the City Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.
