The Museum’s Collection of Religious Artefacts contains various types of objects made of metal, wood and textile, while only a few are made of glass, wax, ceramic, leather and alabaster. They were made in Croatian and foreign production centres in the period from the ninth to twentieth centuries. Many originated in the Croatian Littoral, Lika and north-west Croatia, and most made their way to the National Museum between 1895 and 1920. They were most often gifts from the parish offices with churches under their jurisdiction, or they were purchased from finders if they were excavated artefacts. There are also several objects procured during the first phase of the National Museum, as well as objects “picked up” by Mijat Sabljar on his many travels.

The group of metal objects includes small articles such as crosses, medallions, reliquaries and rosaries, and there are also a few church Eucharistic vessels. The late Gothic reliquaries and Eucharistic vessels from the parish churches in Grobnik and Oštarije stand out. The textile inventory includes chalice covers, vela, stolae and maniples, an eighteenth-century pluvial, and about a dozen chasubles, of which two are made of leather, and a stylistically rather significant chasuble made at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Among the wood objects, including candelabras/sconces, angels, relief images, crucifixes and statues, the “Altar of the Conversion of St. Paul” is particularly noteworthy in terms of its size and the quality of its work. It originally stood in the parish Church of St. Mark in Zagreb. Also notable are two statues of saints made by the renowned master wood-carver Ivan Komersteiner at the end of the seventeenth century. Besides objects from Catholic rites, the

Collection of Religious Artefacts includes objects from the Eastern Orthodox and Jewish rites.

Collection curator

Snježana Pavičić, M.S., Museum Advisor