Montraker! The looming mass of this ancient Roman quarry near Vrsar became, little by little, the Rouen Cathedral of Murtić's later summers. An ambiguous, two-way motif in which, at various times of the day, in various circumstances, he inscribed the movement of light, the arrival and departure of day and night, the illuminations of the seasons, and, on the other hand, the changes of his very self. No longer is it a matter of the light of the sight, but at Montraker, more perhaps than anywhere else, it is the lights and shadows of the being that are tested. The thickening of pain, sparks of hope, plain and perplexed thoughts, qualms before the gates of night. This stone became Murtić's Ararat. His villa rustica is there, not far away. And the physical closeness of the place seems to want to tell us that this stone of salvation had become a part of the painter himself. What is there to bear this impression out? Whether one feels it or not, men have been at work at Montraker through the centuries; this is a region that has been given shape by the hand of man. The message from the stone is: Man survives.