Renata Gotthardi-Škiljan was born in 1924 in Zagreb. At the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb she took a BA (art history), classical archaeology and culture history, in 1952. From 1948 she worked in the Yugoslav/Croatian Academy.
From 1957 she was manager of the Valvasor Collection (17 volumes) of the Zagreb Archdiocese in the Croatian Academy Department of Prints and Drawings. The Department of Prints and Drawings was founded as part of the then Art Class of the Yugoslav, today Croatian, Academy of Sciences and Arts, as a special art institution, as collection of drawings, prints and posters as part of the Fine Arts and Music Class, set up in 1947. Stella Übel was the first director, and her curators were Renata Gotthardi-Škiljan and Božo Bek.
During her career, Renata Gotthardi-Škiljan arranged 97 exhibitions, the best known of which are the exhibitions of Yugoslav prints and drawings the Drawing Biennials (4-15) and the Printmaking Biennials (1-11), Dutch and Flemish Prints from the holdings of the Department; eight big exhibitions from the Valvasor Collection, to accompany which she produced four scholarly catalogues. She also wrote two scholarly catalogues of the Bogišić Graphic Collection in Cavtat. She took part in many scholarly conferences and symposia, concerning for instance Julije Klović and Baltazar Bogišic.
As part of the museum work she introduced into the Prints and Drawings Department a professional and scholarly study and handling of material according to the rules of the profession, as in all big graphic arts centres, with three original contributions - the manner of mounting and suspending sheets so as to avoid damage; the manner of exhibiting posters on a cardboard support covered with plastic sheeting; and the manner of storage in a vertical position in special cupboards.
She authored 110 exhibition catalogues, forewords and articles in specialised journals. For her work, she was decorated with the Order of the Croatian Daystar with the figure of Marko Marulić.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on May 20, 2004.