By the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo

Five years after Austro-Hungarian troops marched into Bosnia in 1878, the Viennese painter Alois Schönn set down this crowd at the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, over the Miljacka river. The Belvedere thinks the picture may have been commissioned because of that occupation. What he chose to show was a market day. Men in red fezzes and white turbans bargain on the cobbles, a man sits on the ground beside the horses, sheep lie by the stone parapet, and a minaret rises beyond the rooftops. The museum reads the scene as a portrait of the city's mix of cultures and faiths, in a place that had been under Ottoman rule for centuries. It also records the canvas under another title, Market Scene in Herzegovina, even though Sarajevo lies in Bosnia. In June 1914 the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot beside this bridge.