Zbirka franjevačkih portreta u samostanu sv. Mihovila u Subotici

The Franciscan monastery of St. Michael in Subotica has celebrated the 300th anniversary of it’s foundation last year (2017). As the organizer of the town’s and the wider area’s cultural life these past centuries, the monastery and church of St. Michael retain the first and most significant artworks of the region, among others a unique collection of Franciscan portraits, which originally numbered 35. These paintings are the work of Mathias Hanisch, a Czech itinerant painter of the late Baroque (Prague, ca. 1754 – Vukovar, 1806) and were created in the last years of the 18th century. His clients were the most prominent inhabitants of Subotica at the time – town officials, landowners of Bunjevac origin, physicians and of course Franciscan friars. The portraits were made conforming to graphic templates and they display the best-known Franciscan saints such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony of Padua as well as less famous saints, e.g. Blessed Jacob of Zadar. According to tradition, the Franciscan figures portrayed are none other than the friars who lived in Subotica at the painter’s time.