Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17018/portal.2016.13
Plastered and Painted Medallions – A Contribution to the History of the Façade Design in Continental Croatia in the 17th and 18th centuries
Petar Puhmajer
orcid.org/0000-0003-4630-8863
; Croatian Conservation Institute, Section for Immovable Heritage Documentation, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In the 17th- and 18th-century architecture of Continental Croatia, there is a number of façdes articulated with a raster of repetitive fields in various forms, which are called ‚medallions‘. The author determines the origins of these forms relating them to the works of the Italian builders of the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as paths of their adoption in the Habsburg lands, especially in the big cities like Vienna, Prague or Graz, where from they came to Croatia.
In Croatia, this type of design is seen in three phenomena. The first is a plastered articulation made of vertical and horizontal strips, in which the inner fields make the medallions, which is completely influenced by Styrian architecture. The second are the wall-painted compositions with randomly painted medallions on a group of buildings near the Croatian-Styrian border, modelled on the works of the architect Domenico Sciassia. And the third is a mature-baroque motif of the cartouche-shaped medallions in Slavonia, which seem to be brought in by the architects who came from Vienna and Hungary. Further transformations of the medallion composition occured in the late 18th century with the geometrical forms shaped as rows of plastered rectangular „plates“, which paved the way for the development of the „Plattenstil“, typical of neo-classicist architecture in Central Europe.
Keywords
architecture; 17th century; 18th century; baroque; façdes; medallions; articulation; architectural decoration; wall painting; painted façdes; plastered façdes
Hrčak ID:
171700
URI
Publication date:
28.12.2016.
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