Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17685/Peristil.56.4
Traces of Early Renaissance Decorative Motifs in the Gothic Domestic Architecture of Zadar in the 1470s
Laris Borić
; Sveučilište u Zadru, Odjel za povijest umjetnosti
Abstract
In the third quarter of the 15th century, at the closure of the Gothic era, an entire row of Romanesque houses was rebuilt and gathered into rather large blocks, with inner courts and porches, surrounded by work spaces for household, gardening and other domestic chores, on the ground floor, and the living quarters on the first floor. In this period the old Romanesque walls were given new windows, of which the most monumental specimens form a unique type, which appears to be a variation of Ruskin’s sixth window type, framed by two variants of vertical alternating indentation patterning. The jambs are decorated with the design of a fluted niche, presented in shortened perspective, and surmounted by a shell. The window-sill is supported by two consoles, fluted and decorated with Renaissance coats of arms and sometimes with putti reggifestoni in the cornice. Except in the Venetian monofora, this type of window points to the circle of Andrea Alessi,
who used the decorative motifs on window frames mentioned above in his Dalmatian commissions, or to his collaborator Petar Berčić who worked with him in the 1450s, and who also worked in Zadar in the 1470s, when this type of window came into use, and was favoured down to the moment of the introduction of the round-arched Renaissance window at the end of the century. Aware of its prevalence and almost endemic uniqueness, the author of this text proposes that the type of window he singled out, marked by the characteristics mentioned above, could be called “the Zadar monofora”
Keywords
Zadar; Gothic-Renaissance domestic architecture; Ruskin’s sixth type of windows
Hrčak ID:
134119
URI
Publication date:
5.3.2014.
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