Original scientific paper
The Venetian Schiavoni and the 1498 Historical-Liturgical Booklet in the Honor of St Jerome the Illyrian
Luka Špoljarić
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
Although he had long been revered as the apostle of the Croats in Glagolite circles of the Croatian church, St Jerome’s popularity reached a peak during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Having been exposed to the pan-European diffusion of humanism and humanist nationalism, Croatian-Dalmatian churchmen and lay humanists turned Jerome into their national patron saint and the emblematic figure of their nation. This paper draws attention to a historical-liturgical booklet that testifies to the wide popularity of the saint in Croatian-Dalmatian intellectual circles, specifically among the schiavone diaspora of Venice. The booklet, which was prepared in 1498 in Venice, consists of two texts: one is a polemical treatise on the origin of St Jerome composed by a certain V. S., while the other is a hymn and a prayer to the saint composed by a certain N. Ia. Sa. The texts were preserved on a slightly damaged folium among the papers of the fifteenth-century notary and canon of Zadar Cathedral, Jerolim Vidulić (ca. 1440–1499). Although they have received little attention, the texts are not completely unknown in Croatian scholarship. They were even published, though separately, with numerous errors and dubious editorial decisions by Vinko Valčić and Petar Runje.
The paper starts by shedding light on the identity of Jerolim Vidulić. It is suggested that Vidulić received the texts through his personal or family connections to Venice, where he lived during the late 1470s and early 1480s, perhaps in the household of Maffeo Vallaresso, archbishop of Zadar. Vidulić is presented as a humanist who left very little of his own writing, yet who had a penchant for collecting short pieces of both humanist and Croatian vernacular literature. In the last year of his life, Vidulić received the booklet from Venice and then made a close-packed transcription on a single paper folium, unfortunately omitting the full names of its authors.
The first of the two texts that form the booklet is V. S.’s Preface on the Origin of St Jerome. V. S. defines his treatise as a »preface to our prayer«; it is an invective against Biondo Flavio and other Italian historians who are »envious of our nation« and »falsely claim that Jerome was an Italian«. V. S. constructs his preface around a series of arguments disproving this claim. First, Jerome was not born in Istria, as Italian historians maintain, since the saint himself states that his hometown of Stridon was located in the middle, i.e. on the border, of Dalmatia and Pannonia, neither of which is contiguous with Istria. Indeed, according to V. S., the very name »Stridon« comes from the Illyrian (i.e. Slavic) »srida«, meaning »middle«, referring to its geographical location. He then identifies it as Srida (Glaž), a presently unidentified market town in western Bosnia, which according to V. S. has ruins and a church in St Jerome’s name, and is recognized as the birthplace of the saint. Modernizing the names of ancient provinces, V. S. disputes the identification of Pannonia with Hungary, and interprets it instead as Bosnia, which allows him to situate Jerome in the very heartland of Illyria proper, as it were.
V. S. next presents a Pan-Slavic vision of the Illyrian nation, boasting that Czechs, Poles and Wallachians all speak the Illyrian language. This allows him to claim, with recourse to no known source, that Jerome’s father was a governor of the Dalmatian province not on behalf of the Romans, as Italians maintain, but on behalf of the king of the Vandals, i.e. the Polish king »Almeric«, presenting the Polish kingdom as the center of a polity that in Jerome’s time included the entire Illyrian nation under its rule. This is in fact the first known instance of Pan-Slavism in Croatian-Dalmatian humanist literature, appearing twenty seven years earlier than Vinko Pribojević’s celebrated speech De origine successibusque Slavorum held in Hvar in 1525. It is argued that the Pan-Slavism of both V. S. and Vinko Pribojević should be read as responses to the erosion of Hungarian authority after the death of Matthias Corvinus and the key role taken up by the Polish kings in the wars against the Ottomans. V. S. and the rest of the Venetian Schiavoni, who in 1498 had not yet received the news of the catastrophic outcome of the Polish campaign in Moldavia, presumably saw the Polish king as the liberator of their homeland from the Turkish oppression and with this in mind constructed a utopian vision of St Jerome’s times. The Preface ends with V. S.’s attack on the foolishness of Italian historians and a reminder that Jerome invented the Illyrian, i.e. Glagolitic, alphabet. After the end of V. S.’s preface, there follows a paragraph in which either N. Ia. Sa. or Jerolim Vidulić added an altered quote from Jerome’s letter to Nepotian (ep. 52) in order to further strengthen the argument that Jerome was an Illyrian.
N. Ia. Sa.’s Hymn to St Jerome the Illyrian is composed of 17 quatrains that make altogether 68 verses and is based on an earlier hymn to the saint that was composed in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the center of the saint’s cult. In N. Ia. Sa’s hymn Jerome is celebrated according to the standard features of his iconography: as a cardinal, ascetic, model of learning, translator of the Bible. In line with Croatian-Dalmatian iconography of the saint, he is also shown as an Illyrian and inventor of the Glagolitic alphabet. However, there are two features in the hymn for which we find no parallels in other known texts. One is the image of Jerome as the teacher of nations: in two quatrains Jerome is presented as bequeathing the Vulgate not to Christendom but to Italians specifically, while in another one he is noted – presumably on the basis of N. Ia. Sa.’s misreading of Jerome’s comment in his De viris illustribus – as the editor of the Greek New Testament. This image of Jerome should be interpreted in the context of rivalries of national communities in Renaissance Venice, in which the Schiavoni were claiming Jerome for themselves but also stressing the indebtedness of Italians and Greeks to Jerome, and consequently to the entire Illyrian nation. The other notable feature in the hymn is Jerome’s role as the protector against plague, which also appears in the prayer to St Jerome that connects to the hymn. Thus, although the Schiavoni wanted to use the opportunity to claim Jerome for their nation and celebrated him as the national patron saint, the plague, which we know hit Venice in 1498, was in fact the main reason behind the composition of the entire booklet.
In the final section of the paper, the booklet is interpreted in connection to the only institution in Venice that celebrated the cult of St Jerome the Illyrian, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The creation of the booklet should be seen as a result of the growing importance of Jerome, who was not the original titular saint of the confraternity when it was founded in 1451 but was coopted into the saintly pantheon later on. It is argued that this importance, most visibly seen in Vittore Carpaccio’s cycle of paintings produced for the confraternity in 1502–1507, was connected with the introduction of Slavonic liturgy into the life of the confraternity, which, during their litigation with the prior of San Giovanni del Tempio over this matter, the Schiavoni legitimized by calling on the myth that St Jerome invented the Glagolitic letters and Slavonic liturgy. The historical-liturgical booklet of 1498 was, of course, prepared for the purpose of the Latin service (which also continued to be in use), but it legitimized the use of Slavonic liturgy on special feast days. Finally, the paper suggests that the booklet was most likely meant for the printing presses – and, considering the great loss of copies of such small, cheap editions from this period, perhaps even was printed – in order to be distributed in the confraternity. The booklet stands as an important testament to the ideological horizons of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni from the golden age of its history when its members decided to define their national identity through historical narrative and liturgy, painting and architecture, and make their presence known on the multicultural stage of Renaissance Venice.
The appendix of the article includes the first complete edition of the booklet, drawing on the transcription of the texts done by Giuseppe Praga (1893-1958) when parts of the texts damaged by smudge were slightly more legible; the parts reconstructed by recourse to Praga appear in italics. The appendix also includes the first Croatian translation of both texts. In the edition, N. Ia. Sa.’s hymn and prayer, which constitute one single text, are marked separately as the second and third text of the booklet, for the sake of easier referencing.
Keywords
Renaissance; nationalist discourse; Illyrianism; St Jerome; Venice; Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni; Jerolim Vidulić; Slavonic liturgy
Hrčak ID:
199390
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2018.
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