Original scientific paper
A Contribution to the Sudy of Historicist Interventions on the Divona Palace in Dubrovnik 1882-1892
Franko Ćorić
orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-8843
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of history of art, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The Dubrovnik Palace of Divona (Sponza) was erected between 1516 and 1522, based on the model by Paskoje Miličević. Nikola and Josip Andrijić also took part in the construction. It is the foremost example of the mixed Gothic-Renaissance style, but also a significant cultural good, whose interpretation has epitomized the process of the postcolonial nationalizing of artistic heritage. The paper brings out archival records regarding the interventions on the Divona between 1888 and 1892, whose protagonists were a local deputy inžinir (constructor) Richard Hänisch, a county inžinirLeonardo Benvenuti, a conservator of the Central Commission Giuseppe Gelcich and a member of the Central Commission Alois Hauser.
The Divona Palace was in the 19th century a public building, housing among other offices, the government, customs and financial authorities. Owing to this fact, interventions on its architecture were under the author-ity of the Viennese Imperial Royal Central Commission, while the interior was under the Financial Directorate.
The county inžinir Leonardo Benvenuti drew up in 1888 and executed from 1890 to 1892 -according to the appraisal of deputy inžinirRichard Hänisch and the member of the Central Commission Alois Hauser, and mediated and monitored by the conservator Giuseppe Gelchich - a restoration project for the loggia, the main and the courtyard façade of the Divona Palace. It is presumed that the stone carving was done by stone carver N. Pasini, as he was among those who had taken a tour of the Divona with R. Hänisch in late September 1886, prior to putting the project together. A valuable record of the historicist intervention is the panel with the inscription “RESTAVRATVM / A•D•MDCCCLXXXX” which testifies
to the influence of Camillo Boito’s ideas.
The historicist interventions on the façades mostly entailed the use of stone fillers to replace or fill in the original stone elements, the replication of architectural decoration after an analogy to the elements of the building itself and/or a replacement with new ones. However, the photographs of the Divona following the historicist intervention reveal that the window tracery on the eastern side of the loggia terrace has been carved completely anew. The brand new elements on the main façade were the pine cones of the single-arch windows tracery, executed after Alois Hauser’s appraisal from 6th September 1891. Ljubo
Karaman later used these as a starting point for dating the first floor to the middle of the 15th century. This detail about the Dubrovnik Divona points out the importance of appreciating the history of conservation, when engaging in a stylistic interpretation of a building.
It is indicative that no records of the adaptation of the Divona interior have been preserved in the Central Commission’s archives. The records regarding the responsibility for such an intervention should therefore, in case they are preserved, be traced down to the District Office’s archives, the Construction Department of the Dalmatian Commission or the Financial Directorate in Zadar, under whose administration was the Dubrovnik financial authority.
Keywords
Divona Palace; Central Commission; stylistic restoration; Richard Hänisch; Leonardo Benvenuti; Giuseppe Gelcich; Alois Hauser
Hrčak ID:
122554
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2013.
Visits: 2.297 *