Painter Frane Bratanić
Under the iron gates

At the time before the invention of photography, there was a need for illustrators, so the archaeologist and ethnographer Francesco Carrara used to commission local painters for this job. Since at the time there were no professional painters in then poor Dalmatia, this task was more or less successfully completed by amateurs such as Frane Bratanić.

Frane Bratanić, a physician, surgeon and Director of the Hospital of Split from 1871 to 1875, painted in his spare time. Thus Bratanić made four drawings of Split landscapes for Carrara’s Album of Split’s Antiques published in Padua in 1847, while a year later these lithographies were followed by oil paintings. One of the oil paintings was lost, while the other three are kept at the Museum of the City of Split. One of Bratanić’s landscapes which is owned by the Museum is a painting titled '’Under the Iron Gates’’.