Review article
https://doi.org/10.53745/ccp.49.95.1
Croatian Tragedy of the 16th Century in Raphael’s Painting “The Transfiguration”
Tamara Bodor
orcid.org/0000-0002-8964-7649
; Faculty of Croatian Studies University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper deals with the analysis of one of the most famous paintings of the Renaissance artist Raffaele Santi, “The Transfiguration”, written by the Croatian priest and musicologist Ivo Kokot, who studied the allegorical meaning of the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Raphael during his stay in Rome in the 1950s. The painting was created at the time of the Fifth Lateran Council, significant for Croatian culture because a number of Croatian humanists held the so-called anti-Turkish speeches. Although this genre was already present in the European oral and written literature of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Croatian authors of anti-Turkish speeches, due to the lived experience of the catastrophe brought by the Ottoman invasions, incorporated themselves into this type of humanistic literature in a special way. The primary goal of those speeches, as far as the speakers from the Croatian ethnic area are concerned, was to influence public opinion, that is, to encourage the Christian rulers of Western Europe to work together in the fight against the Turks. Ivo Kokot brings the creation of Raphael’s painting into a strong connection with the events of the aforementioned Council and presents several strong arguments in support of the thesis that the symbolism of the “Transfiguration” is directly related to the tragedy of the Croatian people in the 15th and 16th centuries. Kokot’s analyzes of Raffael’s paintings presented in this paper were published in the Croatian emigrant magazine Osoba i duh, therefore this paper is a step towards elucidating the contribution of Croatian refugee intellectuals to Croatian historiography and art history.
Keywords
Raffael; Transfiguration; Ivo Kokot; anti-Turkish speeches; Croatian emi grants
Hrčak ID:
333323
URI
Publication date:
8.7.2025.
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