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Two neoclassical palaces of Brac „Maritime oligarchy"
Duško Čikara
orcid.org/0000-0002-9127-5039
; Hrvatski restauratorski zavod, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Built in the the turn of the century late Baroque Neoclassical style, the walls of the unfinished Hranotic palace in Bol and the Gligo palace in Bobovisce, with their distinct symmetry of layout plan and mirroring compositions of articulated facades, present an isolated example of the realisation of the rationalist approach in architecture of a rural island environment. The palaces were commissioned by prominent Brac shipowners and landowners, who, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas, decided to invest the capital accumulated in the period of the economic conjuncture at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century in building spacious freestanding palaces located on the outer edges of the settlements, far from the sea side. Lacking substantial information, the period of the construction of the palaces and their commissioners were determined relaying on the living contexts of the two families, reconstructed with the help of the data contained in various historical documents. During the architectural analysis the focus was directed onto the method of construction of the layout plan. The experiments have shown that the planes of the party walls of both palaces overlap the intersections and the sides of the system of iterating hexagrams. In order to operationalise the system, a two layer raster – matrix consisting of two layers of rhombi was created. They present an angular equivalent to the intersection of two circles (mandorlas), that is, the vesica piscis shape. Taking into consideration a great degree of similarity between the layout of the Brac palaces and the layouts of certain villas designed by Palladio, the same method was applied onto a series of historical depictions published in the works of Palladio and Bertotti- Scamozzi. The method was then applied onto the depictions of the facades as well. The entire procedure was repeated on the depictions of Ancient architecture. The results suggest that by using the geometrical method ad triangulum, used in medieval times as well, it is possible to build architectural models of buildings of Ancient architecture, that is of its later derivatives. The typical proportions of the Renaissance buildings derived from equilateral triangle suggest the use of the aforementioned method or its equivalent; geometrical or arithmetic method respectively. “Crypto-palladianism“, as this layout organisation based on Palladio`s designs could be described, however, does not imitate the model in terms of exterior design and interior decoration thus enabling a comfortable, but also, at the same time, utmost functional living satisfying the needs of the new age what could be considered the most valuable accomplishment in realisation and planning of these, admittedly modest civic palaces. The values thus achieved compensate for the relatively inadequate level of representativeness. Unlike the Gligo palace facades, designed in the spirit of the local building tradition by Neoclassical reduction of the Baroque style elements, present in their previous residential buildings, the ambitiously planned Hranotic brothers palace with its colorist formal syntax accomplished by an inventive use of local building material, reveals northern Italian influences. A certain degree of unfinishedness of these palaces, particularly their spacious yards as their essential components, is the consequence of the tragic events that befell their commissioners. The fact they died in the interval of several years suggests that the construction of the palaces started approximately at the same time. The dating method used shows these isolated examples of Baroque Neoclassical architecture on the island of Brac to be the work of the same author, who most probably lived on the island while they were being constructed. The hypothesis on the existing link between the two commissions is additionally supported by the existing data on possible mutual contacts and relations between the members of the two families.
Ključne riječi
Baroque Neoclassicism; civic palaces; Brac; the beginning of the 19th century; hexagram; ad triangulum; Palladianism
Hrčak ID:
149984
URI
Datum izdavanja:
26.10.2015.
Posjeta: 1.530 *