Bukovac and Bogišić Art Heritage Visit

ABOUT THIS EXPERIENCE

The Bukovac and Bogišić Art Heritage Visit combines two of the three sites that carry Cavtat’s modern cultural identity: Bukovac House, the birthplace and museum of the painter Vlaho Bukovac, and the Rector’s Palace, the historic seat of Ragusan administration that houses the Baltazar Bogišić Collection. Vlaho Bukovac, born in Cavtat in 1855, is an important figure in modern Croatian painting — the painter whose work and teaching brought modern European painting to the Adriatic and shaped a generation of Croatian artists. Baltazar Bogišić, also born in Cavtat, was a jurist, legal historian, ethnographer and collector whose work on customary law and legal history gave him a distinguished place in 19th-century European scholarship, and whose assembled library, archive and holdings form the collection housed in the palace. The two sites together give the artistic and scholarly layer of the town: the painter and the jurist, read within a short walk of each other and of the harbour. Opening arrangements, exhibitions and the accessible portion of the Bogišić Collection can change, because conservation, reconstruction and display arrangements affect what is on view at any given time, so the visit is framed around what may be open rather than a fixed itinerary. It cannot be guaranteed that both interiors are open on the same day, and the visit should be planned with that in mind. For a visitor it is the indoor cultural counterpoint to the harbour and the peninsula walks — the place where Cavtat’s modern cultural ambition is read through the lives and work of two of its most distinguished sons.