Colloquia Maruliana ..., Vol. 5 , 1996.
Original scientific paper
The Thematic Correspondences Between Marulić and the 15th/16th Century Dalmatian Art
Igor Fisković
Abstract
This comparative analysis of the contents of Marulić’s literary works and the 15th century Damatian art, particularly sculpture, brings to light a dense and interesting fabric of their thematic and conceptual corespondences. Stressing the fact that in no other old Croatian writer the phenomenon attains such complexity and force, the author undertakes to bring forward all of its numerous aspects, in order to show the gen-eral cultural and historical importance of Marulić that transcends art itself.
Tracking down the first examples and the ramification of the Renaisance plots in Dubrovnik, where they had the earliest and the richest growth, the author draws attention to the motifs taken over from classical mythology and employed with the scope of glorifying the socio-political identity of this old city-state in Eastern Adriatic. Ana-lyzing the works that confirm the afflorescence of the Renaisance ideas in southern Croatia before Marulić’s day, i.e. in the second quarter of the Quattrocento, he reconstructs the picturesque local Pantheon of a markedly prophane stamp. Concluding that the majority of these works drew on the spiritual and intellectual climate on the town of a clearly cosmopilitan orientation, the author stresses their modernity in terms of the general criteria established for different phases of Renaissance.
Searching for similar manifestations in the Venetian Dalmatia, the environment in which Marulić lived and worked, the author discovers a greater dependendance of the local culture on medieval traditions and, as a consequence, the lesser latinization of the artistic media. Namely, it was only after 1440 that its leading sculptors, like Georgius Mathei Dalmaticus, showed signs of secularization. In this somewhat be-lated return to antiquity he recognizes primarily the desire of a community threatened by the advance if the Turks from the Balkans to co-operate more closely with Western Europe. At the same time he observes the reintegration of the classical style and still more of the classical themes, that were to mark equally the local art and the local literature.
Parallelly he tries to identify the subjects that the most outstanding of the con-temporary local sculptural works share with Marulić’s verse, particularly with his passional cycle. Giving an iconological interpretation of a sequence of local sculptures in stone and wood, he finds out that their subjects and treatments are supported not only by the contemporary literary trends and preoccupations, but also by the literary descriptions of the time. The vastness of the process makes him think of it as of the fruit of the psychosis that affected a people long exposed to perils and travail on the threshold of the Christian world. He claims that the political calamities intensified the addressing of the local art to Christ’s sacrifice or passion, that attained, in some instances, moments of true glorification. Also, this explains the mixing of the medieval mysticism and devotion with the new humanist sensibility of the early Renaissance, as well as a slight lagging behind the time, the quality that the contemporary art shared with Marulić’s writings. The latter should not come to us as a surprise since the poet knew personally both the executors (sculptors Georgius Petri and Andrea Alessi) and the commissioners of these works of art.
Revealing all sorts of thematic correspondences as the apogee of ununderstandable cultural and historical situation in Dalmatian art, the author compares Marulić’s Croatian poem the Tuženje grada Hijerozolima (The Lamentation of the City of Jerusalem) with one of the masterpieces of Trogir’s High Renaissance sculpture, finding, in both cases, original interpretations of the “holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem”, nurtured by the wish of transposing the place of miraculous salvation into the authors’ native country, as the only mode of surviving for the people groaning under the enemy’s pressures.
The analyses of this kind reinforce the integrity of the Croatian Renaissance, affirming the meaningful significance of its expressive responses, in a boundary area of Western Europe.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
9739
URI
Publication date:
22.4.1996.
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