CROATIAN FINE ART, Ivan Tišov

Ivan Tišov, Astronom (Astronomer), 1900, (oil on canvas, 47.8 x 68.6 cm) Ivan Tišov (Viškovci near Đakovo, 1870 - Zagreb, 1928) was fascinated from childhood by frescoes in the Djakovica cathedral, which led him to continue his education at the Zagreb School of Crafts after attending a secondary school in Osijek a short time. Thanks to the scholarship provided to him by Izidor Kršnjavi, he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna from 1889 to 1893, and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1894. Upon his return to Zagreb, he was appointed Professor of painting and drawing at the School of Crafts. From 1913 to 1914 he was living in Paris, honing his craft at the Académie Julian. At the beginning of the last decade of the 19th century, Kršnjavi hired him to make figural decorations in the palace of the Department of Theology and Education at the address Opatička 10, so he painted the Muses on the walls of the staircase and images with antique themes in the Pompeii room together with Belo Čikoš Sesija, Oton Iveković and Ferdo Kovačević. He also participated in the decoration of the ceiling of the palace central hall - Golden hall - where he painted the allegories of Theology, Education, Art and Science (1893-1900). He has continued to successfully handle orders of painting decorations of public spaces, among which stand out the works in the foyer of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (1904-1905) and paintings at the National and University Library (1914). He has made a rich sacral opus in churches throughout Croatia, and painted numerous portraits, nudes and landscapes, shifting between late historicism, realism and symbolism, with limited influences of the Vienna secession and Bukovac's plein air painting. Oil on canvas Astronom (Astronomer) from 1900 was a preparatory work for the allegory of Science from the ceiling of the Golden hall of the Palace at Opatička 10. While other allegories have several characters, on the allegory of Science - located on the narrow side of the vault forming a pair with the allegory of Art - Tišov has opted for a restrained image of an astronomer who is sitting next to the telescope, curiously looking toward the sky. Preparatory work almost to the minutest detail corresponds to the allegory on the vault and shows a strong tendency to the mystical symbolist synthesis, the painting quality which was not visible in his other figural decorations, and by which he best fitted into the dominant artistic achievements of the turn of the century. Petar Prelog, Ph.D., senior scientific associate at the Institute of Art History