Dubravka Vlaho Bukovac

As chief curator of the Croatian art pavilion at the Millennium Exhibition held in Budapest in 1896, Croatia’s most internationally successful artist Vlaho Bukovać showed several of his own paintings. During the exhibition, the Hungarian state purchased his work Dubravka for the new Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.
The subject of the painting is the 1628 premiere of the pastoral drama Dubravka by the Dalmatian poet Ivan Gundulić. Important from the perspective of Croatian national consciousness, the drama is the reworking of an ancient myth that would later become an allegory for the liberation of Raguza (today Dubrovnik).
The relationship between Hungary and Croatia continued to be unbalanced even after the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s special 1868 settlement between the two kingdoms. Some of the works shown in the Croatian pavilion at the Millennium Exhibition even made reference to this. Through its depiction of illustrious personalities, for example, Dubravka was intended as a demonstration of Croatian cultural development. The man in the red cloak beneath the crimson baldachin is the dramatist Ivan Gundulić, while the man applauding from the balcony is the painter himself.

Bianka Izsák-Boda