Original scientific paper
Ranjina's House in Dubrovnik from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century
Nada Grujić
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
The house built by a member of the noble Ranjina (Ragnina) family at the end of the fifteenth century in the Pustijerna area holds an important place in the architecture of Dubrovnik. It stands apart from the buildings constructed at the same period in other parts of the town both in the organization of its space and the structuring of its front. It is one of the few surviving town residences of the Dubrovnik nobility of that time in the city as a whole, and a notable example of Gothic-Renaissance residential architecture. Research on location conducted in 1989 made it possible to fix the individual phases of construction and to mark the alterations which gradually transformed the character of this house, from the fifteenth century when it was built down to our century.
The basic characteristics of its architecture were determined by city planning factors: it was built on an insula constituted by two parallel rows of houses separated by a canal. This is the reason why all the apertures are on its front and why, owing to the smallness of the plot, it was built rather high. ln spite of the limited surface of each floor, it comprises a complete programme arranged along its vertical axis: it has all the spaces known in the fifteenth century, and they are clearly differentiated: rooms (camere), small hall (saloggia) and large hall (sala, salla). Although it is a house of the nobility it has a polyvalent programme: the ground floor is used for business, the residential areas are upstairs.
All the architectural forms and decorative motifs of the house front (except for the ground floor windows) belong to the first phase of the construction. Against the almost unchanged exterior of the house, its interior shows a much more dynamic series of changes, especially regarding the organization of the residential floors. After the earthquake in 1667, the greatest change was the displacement of the staircase from the hall on the second floor away from the original perimeter of the house, to the space of the canal. The second floor hall thus became the most representative room in the house and received a strong Baroque stamp. Although in the nineteenth century some architectural styles (e.g. the Gothic) were replaced by style nouveau, making the intervention appear like a restoration, the functions of certain parts of the house (the representative ones in particular) were also drastically altered (e.g. an entire floor was interpolated into the third floor hall by dividing it into a series of smaller rooms). With this began the degradation of the house. In the twentieth century the partitioning of space was continued on all floors, regardless of their original function.
The construction history of the Ranjina house is marked by an involutive process. Each subsequent phase degraded some of the original 15th c organization of its space, either by reduction in size or function. However, after sorting out all the later alterations, one can still clearly envisage the true character of the earliest, Gothic-Renaissance stage.
In the course of establishing the original plans of all the floors, data about the organization of the front facade also came to light. Although the apertures were shaped and decorated in accordance with the function of the rooms, their arrangement did not follow that of the rooms. Except for the highest (third) floor, all of which was just one room, the space distribution in the house was asymmetrical, while the windows show a clear tendency towards axial symmetry: indeed, the first, second and third floor clearly stress the central axis of the building. This tendency towards regularity should not be identified either with a Gothic or Renaissance influence, because the three-part division of facades had long before been known in Venetian architecture, and regularity has always been a feature of elegant buildings.
Some changes of the interior and exterior (front) of the house were more uniform: for example, the gradual heightening of the rooms was accompanied by the heightening of windows. One should also be aware of the interesting "open" design of the third floor, with its one large hall. This schema was inherited and repeated until to the very beginning of the sixteenth century, and should therefore be seen as belonging to the typology of Dubrovnik residential architecture rather than to any particular stylistic category.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
138679
URI
Publication date:
15.12.1996.
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