Medieval painting in Serbia

The life of painting among Serbs in the Middle Ages was determined by factors of different values and strengths, among which are certainly the most important: size, power and destiny of Serbian state creations, confessional affiliation of the people and the position of its church institutions in relation to Constantinople and Rome. , the purpose of religious painting, but also its political role.

The time frame of painting creation among Serbs in the Middle Ages can be precisely determined. According to its content, religiously, without a single lay trace, it was implanted in the Serbian environment after the acceptance of Christianity, in the second half of the 9th century. True, the first works were destroyed - the oldest are preserved from the end of the 10th century. It was extinguished in parallel with the disappearance of the last Serbian state just before the end of the 15th century, when it lost some of its important creative properties.

Figures of restrained movements, almost without plasticity, reduced in color to ocher and pink tones, with two-tone white and yellow backgrounds, have distant similarities with rare Byzantine provincial products from the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century (Koropi na Atici, Sv. Stefan in Kostur). Highly washed, these frescoes do not provide much information about the mixtures of Byzantine and Western stylistic expression.

There is more evidence of that in the works from the area of the Zeta state, Dubrovnik and its surroundings. Fragments of frescoes from the Dubrovnik Cathedral, from the churches of St. Nikola na Prijekom and Sv. Elijah on Lopud, mostly found during archeological excavations, show that, in the decades around 1100, the city had a favorite painting in which Byzantine types of saints and Byzantine stylization of forms were simplified in a Romanesque way: the drawing was significantly thickened, shadows intensified. the modeling is left without halftones, and the expressiveness of the face and movement is underlined.

The balanced relationship between Byzantine and Romanesque stylistic features knew how to be disturbed in Dubrovnik's works, with the predominance of some; the Romanesque, Western one would prevail most often. That is how it is in the program and style of painting in the church of St. Jovana Preteče on the island of Šipan. Byzantine features are represented only in the program of the apse with Deisis and the church eyes, where even some saintly figure resembles the Byzantine prototype of the nave and the Romanesque vault angels.

In the painting of painters who now studied in Vienna, as well as with their professors who influenced them, the Baroque century was extended and so Biedermeier appeared in the 19th century, which was the main mark in the art of Bačka at that time. One coloristic sensibility can be seen in Arsa Teodorović, Nikola Aleksić and Konstantin Danilo, who is the most important of them. These artists also nurtured portrait art.