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A Contribution to the Study of the Early Medieval Sculpture on the Island of Krk
Magdalena Skoblar
orcid.org/0000-0003-1009-0719
; HR, Zadar, Gribora Viteza 2
Sažetak
Early medieval sculpture on the island of Krk is rarely found in the scholarly literature. The reasons for this lie in the fact that no! only do we lack the archaeological context and contemporary architecture for these sculptures but thr early medieval period on the island as a whole is blurred and obscure due to the silence of the ,written sources. The bishop of Krk was first mentioned only in 680, although the early Christian phase of the Krk cathedral speaks of the fifth-century date, when the bishopric might have been founded. An unnamed bishop attended the church synod in Split in the early 10th century and the data become more available with the mm of the millenium Unfortunately, there are no preserved early medieval churches on the island of Krk but one and one can only suppose in which churches the early medieval fragments from Dobrinj, Omišalj, Krk, Punat and Košljun once originally stood. The fragments from Dobrinj are kept in the church of Holy Trinity and they were built in as spolia into the Romanesque church of St Nicholas in Soline, subsequently taken out and brought to Dobrinj. Whether they belonged to the earlier church that gave way to the Romanesque one is still open for debate. The early medieval fragments located in Omišalj are all concentrated in the Romanesque church of St Mary, built in as spolia on the exterior as well as in the pillars and pulpit in the interior, Their number and the fact that they were deliberately made visible in the church its fifteenth-and sixteenth-century remodellings allow us to suppose that there must have been an early medieval church that preceded the Romanesque basilica at Omišalj. This has been confirmed by the nineteenth-century transcription of the now eroded inscription on one of the fragments, noted down by M. Sabljar when it was still somewhat visible. The inscription mentions that a donor named Maurus had something done in the honor of the Lord and the blessed Virgin Mary, the dedication of the present-day church, and it has not been published before. The most interesting fragments are those built in above west door, especially the one that probably belonged to an ambo, decorated with a vegetal scroll and with drilled holes along the border, and the one with the cross-und er-arch motif next to it; as well as the fragment oft he screen slab re-used for the parapet of the pulpit, decorated with the so-called Korbboden motif The fragments from the town of Krk can be linked to the Krk cathedral and to the Benedictine church of St. Lawrence, formerly an early Christian cemetery basilica. Among the fragments from the cathedral, there is a group of three screen slabs which without a doubt belong to the same altar screen. They were decorated with the same cross-under-arch motif and the workmanship is identical on all three of them~ The fragments kept in the gallery Toš in Punat and those in the Franciscan monastery on the small island of Košljunj justI off the shore of Punat bay, were brought from the sites near Punat: the churches of St. George at Mala Krasa and St. Nicholas on cape Negrit. The fragments found in the church of St. George have been attributed to the early medieval altar screen installed in the early Christian church. The fragments taken out from the apse of St. Nicholas, on the other hand, did not necessarily belong to it but might have been easily brought from somewhere else. However, there are also fragments of uknown origin. The catalogued early medieval fragments from the island of Krk in this paper have been subjected lo the stylistic analysis, the only possible analysis due to lack of archaeological context, epigraphical material and the written sources. Such an analysis has shown that most fragments can be dated lo the 9th century on the basis of the geometrical intcrlace pattern, typical of the Carolingian sculpture on the east Adriatic coast and in Italy as well. The choice of motifs and the quality of workmanship are uniform both in the north and south part the island. The preserved fragments of the screen slabs in Omišalj, Punat and Krk display the extensive use of the cross-under-arch motif which was also widespread in the ninth century sculpture on the east Adriatic coast but in Venice and Rome as well The analysis of the early medieval fragments from the island of Krk has proven that regardless of the many obstacles, the first step of making the fragments known to the scholar1y public should be made in order to make the future research easier. Instead of the written sources and the historical data, the sole witnesses who speak of the early medieval life through the sculpting activity are these reliefs. Translation: Magdalena Skoblar
Ključne riječi
Krk; Omišalj; early middle ages; sculpture; geometrical interlace; cross-under-arch
Hrčak ID:
81720
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.9.2006.
Posjeta: 2.006 *