Ivanović was inspired to create the painting upon reading a book titled History of the Serb People while studying at the Munich Academy.

According to David A. Norris, a scholar specializing in Serbian cultural history, conditions in 19th-century Serbia were unsuitable for the development of visual art.

Materials were difficult to come by, studio and exhibition spaces were virtually non-existent, and there were no art patrons willing to financially support painters and purchase their finished works.

In the first half of the 19th century, Serbian visual artists dedicated themselves almost exclusively to decorating the walls of churches and producing icons and other religious objects.

Precisely what her training entailed is unknown, but since women were not admitted into the Academy of Fine Arts at the time, it is likely that Ivanović was classified as a "special student" and tutored privately.

Some scholars have suggested that she studied under Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, though this cannot be established with any degree of certainty since most documents pertaining to her time in Vienna were destroyed in subsequent wars.

A small force led by Uzun Mirko spearheaded the assault, seizing the city gates that faced the Sava River.

[2] According to the art historian Ljubica D. Popovich, The Conquest of Belgrade is the only known historical composition from the second phase of Ivanović's career, which lasted from 1842 to 1847.

[9] Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, another art historian, compares the work's Romantic presentation to Théodore Géricault's depiction of contemporary shipwreck survivors in The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) inasmuch as neither is a reliable documentary piece.

"In its complexity, deliberate confusion, slashing diagonals, tenebrism and intense colouration," she writes, "it most resembles the paintings of her French Romantic predecessors Géricault and Antoine-Jean Gros, as well as the more contemporary Eugène Delacroix.