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The Most Remarkable of Modern Memorial Chapels
Ivan Mestrovi has Completed, near Ragusa, in Jugo-Slavia—formerly Dalmatia—a Chapel of which He was the Sole Architect, Sculptor, Wood Carver, Mosaic Worker and Decorator
If a poll were to be taken among the European sculptors and critics of art, as to the most significant, the most original, and the most extraordinary of living sculptors, we have no doubt that the ballots would show an overwhelming majority for Ivan Mestrovic, the Serbian, who began life as a shepherd in Dalmatia and who, at the age of eighteen, was apprenticed to a marble worker in Spalato. The world has witnessed three great exhibitions of his work, the first in Rome, in 1911, the second in London, in 1915, and the third in Paris, in 1919. Two years before the Paris exhibition, he began working at a colossal national monument for the Serbian Government—the great temple of Kossovo, on the spot where Serbia suffered her most cruel defeat by the Turks, in 1389. The statuary for this temple at Kossovo has often been photographed, and is fairly familiar to American students of art. In 1921, however, he began a still more gigantic work—a great memorial chapel at Cavtat. photographs of which are shown on these two pages. They were made especially for this magazine, and are the first pictures to appear in the United States of this extraordinary memorial.
Mestrovic's sculptures for his national memorial at Kossovo have now been presented by him to the Serbian Government. The government has sent them to Belgrade, pending the day when Serbia will be in a position to erect a temple on the historic plain. These Kossovo figures were packed and ready to send to America for exhibition shortly after the war broke out. The risk of shipping them, however, was deemed too great, so that Mestrovic's larger and more imposing works have never been seen in this country. The British nation has acquired several of his groups.
The work shown above is all from the memorial chapel at Cavtat, which is dedicated to a prominent Serbian family of the name of Racic, one branch of which perished tragically: their death having inspired the idea of this place of entombment near Ragusa, in what is now Jugo-Slavia.
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