References

Vinko Zlamalik, Bela Csikos Sesia (monograph), JAZU and Society of Art Historians, Zagreb, 1984., p. 16.

tempera and watercolor on paper, 71 x 51 cm, signed and dated bottom right, in grey, "Csikos II. 1889."

The study with the figure of a Roman patrician, accompanied by soldiers, watching a resigned commoner, was created by Čikoš in his second year of painting studies at the Vienna Academy. Aware that he had begun his artistic education late, he was already a full 23 years old, and in the first two academic years he worked at a feverish pace and practiced with unbelievable persistence, writes the painter's monograph Vinko Zlamalik.* He studied in the class of Professor Julius Victor Berger, an Austrian painter of historical compositions who led the General Painting Department (Allgemeine Malschule). About ten of the painter's sketchbooks from the student period (1887 - 1891), which are stored today in the Memorial Collection of Bela Čikoš Sesija at HAZU, and especially separate sheets of drawings from the painter's estate that remained in the possession of the painter's son Julius Čikoš, provide an excellent insight into his development: from drawing heads and multiple figurative compositions from ancient casts to the rapid maturation in imaginative genre-scenes with multiple colorfully dressed figures. The painted Study of a scene from ancient Rome nicely shows Čikoš had made up for lost time in the Karlovac cadet school in his second year of study and that, besides mastering drawing skills and precision, he also acquired a convincing physicality of figures, purity in the construction of forms, and even a refined chromatic harmony of composition that surpasses the quality level of academic studies. BRP

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