A vast donated collection with a genuine question mark over how much of it is what it says it is.
This is the most interesting museum in Zagreb to think about and not always the most satisfying to visit, and the reason is that nobody is entirely sure what is in it.
Mimara
Ante Topić Mimara was born in Dalmatia in 1898 and died in Salzburg in 1987. Over a long and extremely opaque life he assembled a collection of several thousand objects — paintings, glass, textiles, ivories, icons, Chinese and Persian material — and donated it to Croatia.
The museum opened in 1987 in a grand neo-Renaissance building of 1895 on Roosevelt Square, originally a school.
The doubts
Mimara’s biography does not survive close reading. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army, appears in Italy and Germany between the wars, was involved in the post-war restitution of art looted by the Nazis in a capacity that has never been fully explained, and acquired an enormous amount of material by routes he did not document.
Scholars and journalists — including a substantial investigation by German researchers — have questioned a large number of the attributions. Works catalogued as Raphael, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Rubens and Canaletto have been challenged, some strongly.
The museum has not published a full independent scholarly catalogue resolving this, and the question of whether some items were looted and never returned to their owners has been raised repeatedly and not settled.
So is it worth going
Yes, with your eyes open, and if it is open at all.
The applied arts are the strength and are not seriously disputed. The glass collection — Roman, Islamic, Venetian — is genuinely excellent. So are the ivories, the textiles, the icons and the Asian material. These do not depend on a signature to be worth looking at.
The paintings should be read as “attributed to” throughout, and the museum’s own labelling has become more cautious over time.
There is something bracing about a museum where the honest response is to doubt the labels, and it is more educational than most galleries where you are asked to accept them.
The closure
The 22 March 2020 earthquake damaged the building, as it damaged most of central Zagreb’s institutions. It has been closed, partially reopened and closed again through the repair programme.
This is the single most important practical fact about it, and it is why this page does not print an admission price.
Around it
Roosevelt Square is one of the corners of the Green Horseshoe, and the Croatian National Theatre is a few minutes away across the park.
More Museums
Museum of Broken Relationships
Objects donated by strangers, each with the story of the relationship it survived. Far better than it sounds.
Museum of Contemporary Art
The biggest museum in Croatia, across the river, with a working slide down the side of it.
Croatian Museum of Naive Art
Paintings on glass by farmers from a village in Podravina, and the only museum of its kind in the world.