The story
In the last room of the Strossmayer Gallery, given over to French painting, hangs a woman in middle age with her hands folded under her chest. People in Zagreb call her their Mona Lisa. She is Juliette Récamier, the Paris society hostess famed for her beauty, painted around 1825 by Antoine-Jean Gros, long after Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard had painted her young. The canvas reached Zagreb as a gift in 1903.
The gallery grew out of one man's buying. Josip Juraj Strossmayer, Bishop of Đakovo in eastern Croatia, collected paintings for some 30 years from 1850, starting with the Italian Renaissance and moving on to Northern and 17th-century pictures. He gave them to the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, which he had helped create, and the gallery opened in 1884 upstairs in the Academy's palace on Zrinski Square, a neo-Renaissance building designed by the Viennese architect Friedrich von Schmidt.
The early Italian rooms hold a panel by Fra Angelico, the Florentine friar-painter, with two small scenes, Saint Francis receiving the stigmata and the death of Saint Peter Martyr. Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini and El Greco are on the walls too. On the ground floor of the same palace stands the Baška Tablet, a stone carved around 1100 and among the oldest surviving inscriptions in Croatian Glagolitic script. The palace was damaged in the 2020 Zagreb earthquake, and the gallery closed for a long restoration.
