National Museum in Belgrade

It has changed many locations since then: from the Kapetan Miša edifice, Princess Ljubica’s Residence and the New Court Palace, to the present day building at Trg Republike (the Republic Square), to which it was moved in 1952. The building completed in 1903 for the Funds Administration, later Mortgage Bank, after the designs by Belgrade architects Nikola Nestorović and Andra Stevanović. At that time, it was one of the first bank buildings in Serbia, after the National Bank premises from 1889.

The monumental appearance of the main façade owes much to the symmetrical academic design, dominated by the entrance part with coupled columns, a luxurious neo–baroque dome, polychromatic façade walls with rich plastic decorations of neo–renaissance origins. The significance of the building was underlined not only by the outside artistry, but also by the ornaments of the interior, the work of well–known artists of the time: Andrea Domenico, Franja Valdman and Bora Kovačlević.

The first extension of the building was completed in 1930, with the addition of an atrium and a wing towards Laze Pačua Street. After the building was adapted to serve as premises of the Museum in 1952, the first subsequent major reconstructions were in 1964 and  1966, after the designs by architects Aleksandar Deroko, Petar Anagnosti and Zoran Petrović. Settled in the very center of Serbian capital, today preserves unique collection of the cultural heritage of Serbia, Central Balkans and Europe.

National Museum in Belgrade with its collection represents the development and civilization changes at the territory of modern Serbia and its nearest surroundings, from the pre-historic times to the late Middle Ages, as well as representative artworks of key  artistic styles and movements, supreme art accomplishments in the national and European art from the Middle Ages to the modern times.

Among the highlits there are the Lepenski Vir culture remains (7th millennium B.C.), Vinca statues (6-5th millennium B.C.), Dupljaja Chariots (16-13th century B.C.), golden masks from Trebeniste (6th century B.C.), Belgrade Cameo (4th century), the Miroslav’s  Gospel (12th century), medieval icons and frescos, national 18th and 19th painting highlights, and representative selection of Jugoslav 20th century artworks (Šumanović, Nadežda Petrović, Meštrović). 

Also within the museum collection are the European artworks dating from 14th century Italian masters (di Credi, Canaletto, Guardi), Neederlandish art (studios of Bosch, Brueghel, van Goyen and Rubens, and pieces done by Thorope, van Gogh and Mondrian). The  National Museum also keeps the French artworks from the end of the 19th and early 20th century (Corot, Daumier, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Gauguin), where the story about modern art ends with the works of Picasso, Kandinsky, Archipenko and Chagall.

The joint rule of four, the Tetrarchy, instituted by Diocletian, turned into a struggle for power and civil war in the first two decades of the 4th century, assuming the nature of a religious conflict as well. It was Constantine I, also known as the Great, who triumphed in 324. Constantine united the divided Empire and declared himself the sole ruler. By the end of his reign, Constantine’s vision became reality: once again powerful Roman Empire, upheld by a Christian God and founded upon the Christian faith.

A snake-shaped ring made of quality silver with a gold coating on the crest was found in tomb 1 at the Reka site in the area of ​​the Roman mining Kosmaj basin. Massive and striking, it is representative of fashion and taste in the 2nd and the first half of the 3rd century. The ring shank, i.e. the body of a snake of circular cross-section, is spirally twisted and gradually spreads from the tail towards the deltoid head.

While visiting Luxor in 1888, philanthropist and patron Hadži Pavle Riđički Skribešćanski, a nobleman from Mokrin, bought an Egyptian mummy in its original coffin and having brought it – according to his donation letter – out of patriotic intentions from faraway land […] not for  himself but for the Serbian people, gifted it to the National Museum in Belgrade that same year. This unusual and rare gift consist of an anthropoid two-part wooden coffin where the  mummy is placed with a foot pedestal which was once inscribed with hieroglyphics. Vertical hieroglyphics inscriptions on the lid, combined with a stele from the Egyptian Museum found in 1885 in Akhmin, identify the owner as a priest named Nesmin.

These fibulae were worn on the shoulder and used as clasps for cloaks. Clasps decorated with anthropomorphic masks, vegetal and geometric motifs, cast most often in bronze from single-piece moulds, were found in the vast area from the Crimea and the Russian steppes, across the Carpathian Basin, the central and lower Danube River Basin, to Greece. They were frequently used by the Slav population, as testifies by the findings from the settlements in Velesnica and Caričin Grad (Iustiniana Prima). On the right bank of the Danube, in Velesnica, the оldest traces of life attributed to the Slavs were recognized in rectangular wooden pit-houses with furnaces of stone and clay, and pottery workshops.

Luxurious pieces of jewelry merchants brought for wealthy noblewomen from Byzantine workshops, frpm the great centres on the coast of the Black Sea or from Greece. Gold lunular earrings, an item of high fashion of the time, were crafted by combining the traditional shape of the oriental lunula and the perfected techniques of filigree and granulation. They served as a model for many variations of this type of earring, made by local workshops in lands under the Empire's political and cultural influence.

With the expansion and rise of Christianity, and owing to the good organisation of the Christian Church, liturgical objects were brought from far-flung workshops of the Christian East and West. A hanging bronze censer found in the church of Holy Sunday in Pepeljevac with relief scenes from the life of Christ: the Annunciation, the Encounter of the Mother of God and Elizabeth, the Nativity of Christ, the Annunciation to the Shepherds that Christ was born, Baptism and the Crucifixion is object of Roman heritage, which probably derives from an older church, and testifies to the Christianization of the newly settled inhabitants of the central Balkans - the Slavs.

The period from the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century, the so-called Moravian Serbia signifies the development of Novi Brdo (Kosovo and Metohija), the largest and most important Serbian urban, trade and mining center. This fortified multiethnic city, a meeting place of scholars, businessmen and craftsmen, a city that had its own legal code, mint and twelve churches, entered the course of European history trading in the famous glam silver, known for a high percentage of gold, and addressing the approximately one-eighth of European silver production during the first half of the 15th century.

The icon is painted in two zones. Deisis with St. Sava Srpski and St. Simeon Nemanja are presented on the icon, holding a scroll with Psalm 34 (... Come, my children, and listen to me ...). In the lower zone, there are other Serbian saints headed by the patron saint, St. Stephen the First Martyr, and then the kings: St. Stefan The First-Crowned, Stefan King of Dečani, Tsar Uroš and Prince Lazar. The colour of the icon is unusually finely matched to the gold and green base tones.

The icon, slightly damaged in the bottom right corner, is framed by two wide stripes in red and gold. In front of the dark sky illuminated on the horizon, the figure of the Apostle Andrew, with long grey hair and a beard, is presented up to the line below the waist on the darkened ground. He holds an upright bent scroll on his right palm; his left palm in front of his chest is prayerfully turned. The Apostle is dressed in a robe and a cloak with effective folds made of gold and silver.

The scene of Christ's birth is here presented in a hilly landscape on a golden background. From the segment in the sky, at the top of the icon, a ray emerges that dominates the upper part of the composition. The Mother of God is presented in the central part with her arms crossed on the chest, kneeling in front of the entrance to the cave where you can see the newborn Christ in the cradle with a donkey and an ox leaning over. The lower part presents the Annunciation to the shepherds and St. Joseph sitting and waiting to worship the divine fruit of the virgin womb (Lk 2:14).

In the arrangement of Serbian churches of the late Middle Ages, rosettes, as independent units, had a special place in the wall decoration of buildings of the so-called Morava art school. It was created in a combination of Byzantine and Western elements where original forms and ways of execution were created, thus forming new entities in a special relationship between architecture and sculpture. They are distinguished by the fullness of form, colourful variety and specific dense and complex ornamentation where  various types of geometric interweaving and stylised plant motifs in rhythmic shifts, representations of animals and rarely human figures play the main role.

The renewal of the national currency in Serbia in the nineteenth century is inseparable from the renewal of its statehood. The era of uprisings, wars and mutinies, which achieved the long-desired national liberation, was crowned with the recognition of an independent state at the Berlin Congress in 1878. Simultaneously with the political liberation from Turkish dependence, the first steps were taken towards establishing own monetary system. The importance of the national coin as a symbol of statehood was acknowledged by Prince Mihailo Obrenović (1860-1868), and the decision to mint the first coin in renewed Serbia was made during his second reign.

An important decision for the establishment of the monetary system of Serbia followed in 1873 during the reign of the Prince, and then King Milan Obrenović (1868-1889) with the enactment of the "Law on the minting of the Serbian silver coin". The first silver coin was minted in 1875, when the national monetary unit, the dinar, was introduced following the example of Serbian medieval money. The very name 'dinar', which has remained as the monetary unit of the modern monetary system of Serbia, has a long history dating back to ancient Rome.

Following the recognition of full independence at the Berlin Congress in 1878, with the issuance of the first gold denomination of 20 dinars in 1879, Serbia fully fit into the Latin Monetary Union standards, and its money could be exchanged at equal parity for the currencies of the European monetary community. The significance of the first gold denomination minting was also evidenced by the fact that the National Assembly decided on its name by adopting the wording "Milan's gold coin".

Marking of the Second Serbian Uprising fiftieth anniversary and the initiative to establish new decorations gave the reason for the engagement of artists in the development of their conceptual designs. Several artists worked on the sketches of a commemorative medal. Vincenzo Katzler's drafts were accepted, and Anastas Jovanović produced the final version based on the draft in the Vienna Mint by Wilhelm Pittner. The artistic design of this medal, in the form of a double portrait, was a novelty in the  medal making of Serbia. 

At the time when the Serbian Empire was the most dominant power in the Balkans, while the state with a robust central government reached the highest point of its structure and organisation, the coinage of Stefan Dušan, harmonised with the imperial conquests,  economic rise and state monetisation, resulted in extensive monetary production. It acquired its representative expression in the "coronation dinar", the first imperial issuance that was created on the occasion of Dušan's coronation in Skopje in 1346.

The monetary reform that marked the coinage of the Despot Đurađ Branković after 1435 with a new minting organisation, highlighted the changed, secular iconography on the money of enviable artistic processing and the quality of minting. In addition to the issuance of coins without mint marks, their marking commenced during the reform period. A number of these issues referred to as monete nove, relate to the mint that operated on Novo Brdo in the proximity of the most important medieval silver mine in the central Balkans.

The Scordiscs (Celtic community that inhabited the areas around the Sava, Danube and Great Morava rivers) learned about money in their contacts with the Hellenic world and then began minting it themselves. They most often used the silver tetradrachma of Philip of Macedonia as a model, with the representation of Zeus on the obverse and a horseman on the reverse and, as time passed, their inclination towards stylisation became increasingly apparent. The so-called Serbian group encompasses a series of autonomous and typologically diverse specimens with schematised representations, minted in excellent silver. Local minting in the true sense of the word began in the central Balkan region with this coinage.

The medallion of the Roman emperor Gordian III (238-244), of ceremonial character and historical content, belongs to the world cultural heritage because of its characteristics. Finds of bimetallic medallions are very rare and only several specimens with the same typology are known – with the one in Belgrade being in the best state of preservation. The reason for issuing the medallion was the campaign against the Sassanids in 242-243, when Gordian scored a great victory against Shapur’s army.

The colonial mint in Viminacium (present day Kostolac near Požarevac), was opened during the reign of Gordianus III, in 239 AD. With interruptions in minting in 248/9 AD and 253/254 AD, it lasted until Gallienus in 254/255 AD. It supplied small coins that were required to the Roman provinces in the Danubian region, primarly Moesia Superior, thе capital of wich was Viminacium. Depicted on the obverse of these coins is the image of the ruler or member of the imperial family, while scenes of a military character are on the reverse.

The gold medallion of Emperor Valentinian I (364-375) belongs to the ceremonial issues that were minted for imperial anniversaries. They represented a personal gift from the emperor to high-ranking dignitaries and commanders, indicating the emperor' s recognition for outstandig merit. It originates from the mint in Constantinople and was discovered in the village of Zatonje, near Veliko Gradište, Pincum in ancient times, on the bank of the Danube, in 1965.

The historical composition Herzegovinian Refugees (or Bosnian Refugees) represents one of the most significant achievements in Serbian art of the 19th century. It was inspired by the events from the Serbian-Turkish war and the uprising in Nevesinje (1875-1876). Predić's relatives served as models for this composition. The crying girl next to the old man on the left is Mica Predić, the later wife of the composer Stevan Mokranjac; the man with the head bent on the right is the author's brother Radivoj; the girl in the foreground, held by the hand by her mother is his nephew Zorka Predić, while the colourful character of the broad-shouldered highlander with a red turban in the middle of the painting is particularly interesting.

Recognised first as a top-class landscape painter, she also created a series of exceptionally valuable portraits. However, in Nadežda's oeuvre, the only painted self-portrait survived, completed in the time of her second, the so-called Serbian period. It was created in 1907, almost by accident, spontaneously and unpretentiously, as a sign of a friendly relationship with the painter Ivan Grohar, who made the painter's portrait in pastel the same year.

The Shepherdess was created in the period between Šumanović's two sojourns in Paris, as a blend of earlier post-Cubist ideas and experiences adopted during his first stay in Paris and a new, prevailing, neoclassical spirit. On the one hand, the monumental female figure in the foreground - in the exalted landscape ambience, as if carved out from geometrised forms, rationally desaturated in colour, in a balance of plastic and decorative values of the painting - is performed in the tradition of synthetic stylisation of Cezanne and post-Cubism of Lhote and Picasso.

A fountain dominates in the central part of the graphic. Above the fountain, up in the clouds and surrounded by angels, Virgin Mary with Christ is represented with two angels placing the crown on her head. Numerous sick gathered together around the fountain, both kings and beggars. The foreground features the disabled, being brought healing water, while behind the fountain, in a sweeping panorama, stretch the walls of Constantinople. Inscription in Greek is placed below the composition, which reads: You who are the living source of grace, feed all who rush to you.

Two standing naked female figures in a landscape, with their arms outstretched towards each other, form an arch above the man sitting between them, shown up to the knee. The drawing was created during Radović's education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and its development on the foundations of the artistic aesthetics of Paris, as the most important centre of European modernism. It reflects the artist's aspiration to establish the relationship between figures and landscapes, as a hint of constructivist structure and liberation from academic frameworks.

The portrait of Branko Ve Poljanski, one of the ideologues and representatives of the avant-garde Serbian art movement Zenitism, was created at a time when Bijelić was inspired by the ideas of constructivism and the Russian avant-garde. It represents one of his most significant drawings from the avant-garde period - a collaboration with Ljubomir Micić and the Zenit magazine. It is created in the spirit of geometric stylisation, with elements of expressed graphism and expressiveness in  appearance. 

The painting represents one of the seven landscapes that Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) painted during his stay in Berneval, a small town near Dieppe, during the summer of 1900. The work was created in the last decade of the artist's life, which he spent in intensive work and frequent travels. "Landscape in Berneval" belongs to the type of Pissarro's rural landscapes where vegetation and sky occupy the focus of the painter's interest.

The artwork of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) "Purple Beeches" was created as an expression of the belief that the painting should be a reflection of the artist's subjective experience and not an imitation of reality. Thus, perspective and volume are neglected in favour of flat-painted surfaces through which the artist expresses his feelings, while the colour, used rather spontaneously, ceases to have a descriptive function.

The artworks from the thematic cycle Woman at Her Toilette, Degas displayed publicly for the first time in 1886, at the last, 8th exhibition of the Impressionists in a series of ten pastels under the common title A series of nude women bathing, washing, wiping themselves, combing or being combed by someone else. They reflect Degas' new approach in the classically understood processing of the female body that would continue over the next decade. These nudes in the interior were not created as a copy by nature, but represent the sum of what the artist observed.