Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31664/ripu.2019.43.17
The Cattinelli House in 1772: A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Housing Architecture in 18th-Century Zadar
Bojan Goja
; Ministarstvo kulture, Uprava za zaštitu kulturne baštine, Konzervatorski odjel u Zadru
Abstract
In Don Ivo Prodan Street in Zadar, next to the church of
St Simeon, there is a simple four-storeyed building with a
symmetrical plastered façade, in which only the portal on
the ground level and a stone balcony with a fence made
of small pillars on the second floor stand out as accents.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the building underwent
significant changes, as the third floor was added and the
ground-floor windows were transformed into doors. The
house was extensively damaged in bombing during World
War II, and after the reconstruction, only the street front
remained of the original building. This paper focuses on
the building’s appearance in the middle of the second half of
the 18th century, when Antonio Cattinelli, originally from a
Zadar’s family of pharmacists, is recorded as its owner. The
Cattinelli House was then part of a larger building block that
extended for the entire depth of the street block and included
two inner courtyards. The State Archive in Zadar preserves
the architectural assessment of a separate part of the house,
with a façade overlooking St Simeon’s Street (present-day
Don Ivo Prodan Street), made in September 1772.
Based on this assessment, the original appearance of the
three-storey façade has been reconstructed, with two windows
on the ground floor flanking the entrance portal, of
slightly smaller dimensions from those on the upper floors,
protected by iron bars. The window format indicates the
usual commercial use of the ground floor premises. These
were probably not used as shops, which normally had to
have access from the street; rooms with such openings were
mostly used as workshops, taverns, or warehouses. In housing
architecture, such windows were mostly horizontally
laid and set somewhat higher than the rest. The design of
the openings in the façade indicates a vertical division of the
front area of the Cattinelli House into the residential part
on the first and second floors, and rooms intended for commercial
activity, located on either side of the entrance hall on
the ground level. The symmetrically arranged façade mirrors
the original tripartite spatial structure of the interior, with
an accentuated central axis along which the entrance portal
and the second-floor balcony were set. Such organization
of interior and exterior shows close connections between
Zadar’s local architecture and the Venetian tradition of housing
architecture owned by wealthy citizens, which combines
residential and commercial purposes and is derived from
the far more luxurious noble palace of the fontego type. The
main features of this architecture, which, besides Venice
itself, is found in towns all over the lagoon, are a tripartite
façade division, preference for symmetry, emphasis on the
central axis by means of balconies and a portal, a height of
two or three upper floors, and the division of rooms into
commercial ones, laid along the androna on the ground
level, and those intended for housing on the upper floors,
grouped around a portego, usually located on the first floor.
Most of these features are discernible in the isolated, streetoriented
part of the Cattinelli House in Zadar, so the typology
of Venetian housing architecture derived from the fontego
palace type is confirmed in this example as a commonly used
model, previously observed in the design of upper-class and
noble houses in the cities and towns of Venetian Istria and
Dalmatia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
Keywords
Zadar; Cattinelli family; Cattinelli House; housing architecture; 18th century
Hrčak ID:
233949
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2019.
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