The monumental work of Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BiH)painter Mersad Berber, Monograph on Srebrenica, has been in the Vatican Library since Thursday.

To the great pride of the family and the Mersad Berber Foundation, Monograph on Srebrenica, which includes over 600 pages of drawings, artworks, and philosophical quotes by maestro Mersad Berber, has also reached the Vatican Library. It has also made its way into the hands of Pope Leo.

While working on the monograph, Berber relied most on the documentation of United States (U.S.) forensic scientist and anthropologist William Haglund, who discovered the mortal remains of more than 2.000 victims of the Srebrenica genocide, as well as forensic scientist Eric Stover and photographer Gilles Peress, who carried out the identification of Srebrenica execution sites.

Through the tragedy of Srebrenica, in the visual poetry of Mersad Berber, readers are guided by ancient heroes Daedalus and Icarus. Along with the visual dedication, the artist wrote daily, and part of the notes from the studio were published in the monograph. For years, Berber worked on sketches and studies from which the works later compiled in the monograph were created.

An indispensable ingredient of almost all the works of this artistic giant was his love for his homeland, and after the tragic 1990s, Berber tried to transfer onto canvas the death of centuries-old multiculturalism in the Balkans, and it was precisely through this creative phase that he also reached his artistic peak.

He was the recipient of about 50 awards, exhibited in all major cities of the world, and relevant experts ranked him among the world’s greatest post-classicists. He passed away in October 2012.

The works of this artist have been exhibited in London, Hamburg, Istanbul, Chicago, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, Madrid, Zurich, and New York, Klix.ba writes.