Original scientific paper

CRAFT ARTEFACTS AND THE SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE INHABITANTS OF ANTIQUE ISTRIA

Vesna Girardi Jurkić ; Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Hrvatski studiji

Abstract

craft is a skill involving a number of activities of artists
and craftsmen, executors of artistic ideas and creators
of templates that shape, as well as spiritually enrich, the
everyday life of individuals or a community.
The level of material and spiritual reality in antique
Istria depended not only on the economic and social level
of the client and on his taste and education, but also on
the ability of the creator and executor of the work.
In Istria, where members of imperial and senatorial
families as well as numerous officials, priests, and soldiers
lived, high-quality works of art, as well as practical everyday
artefacts, were commissioned and bought.
Ceramic artefacts like cups of the Sarius-Surus type, terra
nigra and terra sigillata with minute details, decorations
and forms, even though mass produced in moulds by
craftsmen, can be considered to be more sophisticated
products than large quantities of mass-produced amphorae
or similar receptacles.
Glass bottles, cups and plates imported from the West
and East were also mass produced, but given the thickness
of the glass, transparency, colour, form, and decoration,
they are more sophisticated than numerous lacrimarii and
other practical everyday vessels. This is why multicoloured
pyxides and “millefiori” type bowls capture our attention
with their unique execution and beauty.
Jewellery, particularly gemstones, although made using
a matrix for mass production in the workshops of Aquileia,
are certainly works of art given that they were individually
processed. In other words, the semiprecious stone, carneol,
or more rarely amethyst, was engraved by hand. The same
is true for amber and jet jewellery.
Silver and gold jewellery and, in particular, engraved
bracelets were mass produced by craftsmen, wherein
artistic features can be noticed if they were individually
made by a jeweller outside a typological series.
Details of floor and wall mosaics are particularly
significant. Tegula vermicula from the Roman villa in Verige
Bay on one of the Brijuni Islands is especially distinguished
as a unique example bearing the image of Dionysus. The
composition “Punishment of Dirce” from an urban villa
in Pula, a high-quality work of an antique mosaic maker,
also has certain artistic qualities.
Stone sculptures, especially portraits from the Republic
era, and those of Antonia Minor and Agrippina Minor from
Pula, members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the
portraits of a woman and a man of the Antoninian dynasty
from Plomin, are not numerous in Istria, but certainly
have high artistic value. Funerary stone monuments range
from awkward stonemasonry executions to a high artistic
level seen in the reliefs of the mausoleum in Pula.
All these groups of practical items and Roman
monuments have been recovered mainly from necropolises
(Pula, Medulin, Nesactium, Savudrija, Sv. Ivan Kornetski,
and others), while individual finds of the stone and mosaic
antique heritage have been recovered in Poreč, Pula,
Nesactium, and Plomin. Presenting and giving value to
individual works of art of antique Pula

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

85439

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/85439

Publication date:

1.11.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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