page_title: The Conquest of Belgrade
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: The Conquest of Belgrade / Legacy
context_page_description: The Conquest of Belgrade is an oil painting by the romanticist Katarina Ivanović, one of Serbia's first significant female painters. Painted in 1844–45, it depicts the capture of Belgrade by Serbian revolutionaries in late 1806, during the First Serbian Uprising.
  Ivanović was inspired to create the painting upon reading a book titled History of the Serb People while studying at the Munich Academy. The painting was poorly received by Belgrade's art critics. The art historian Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson suggests this was due to its poor compositional and spatial conception. By the 1870s, Ivanović's works had largely been forgotten in Serbia. The Conquest of Belgrade was one of four paintings offered by Ivanović to the Gallery of Historical Portraits in 1874. The Gallery went on to form the nucleus of what was to become the National Museum of Serbia. The painting is currently in the possession of the National Museum.
context_section_description: The Conquest of Belgrade is the only known historical composition from the time period that art historian Ljubica D. Popovich describes as the second phase of Ivanović's career, which lasted from 1842 to 1847. The painting was not well received by Belgrade critics. "It was compositionally and spatially poorly conceived," writes Popovich, "but coloristically quite exciting, in cinnabar, umbre and ocher tones". Art historian Žarko Domljan states that the painting is typical of this phase in Ivanović's career, which saw a substantial decline in the quality of her scene paintings. Dissatisfaction with the way her works were received in the Serbian capital prompted Ivanović to leave Serbia.
  Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, another historian, compares the work's Romantic presentation to Théodore Géricault's depiction of contemporary shipwreck survivors in The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) inasmuch as neither is a reliable documentary piece. This, she asserts, is typical of contemporary Serbian painters who did not have a long Romantic tradition and therefore borrowed elements from other artists, especially those from France. Filipovitch-Robinson further describes the painting as "highly theatrical, emotional and stridently Romantic". "In its complexity, deliberate confusion, slashing diagonals, tenebrism and intense colouration," she writes, "it most resembles the paintings of her French Romantic predecessors Géricault and Antoine-Jean Gros, as well as the more contemporary Eugène Delacroix."
  Ivanović painted very little in her final years, and is said to have been largely forgotten in Serbia by the 1870s. In June 1876, she became an honorary member of the Serbian Learned Society, which was later to become the Serbian Royal Academy and eventually the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She died in Székesfehérvár in September 1882.
caption: Art historian Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson draws parallels between the painting and Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19)
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