Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.17018/portal.2022.1
Pre-romanesque stone slab at the ‘three churches’ site in Boninovo, in Dubrovnik
Ivana Tomas
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Art History
Abstract
The topic of this paper is a pre-Romanesque stone slab at the Three Churches site in the Boninovo area of Dubrovnik. The fragment was added to the northern wall of the Baroque church of Sv. Ilar (St Hilarion) in the second half of the 20th century. Although it is a well-preserved large stone slab, it is only mentioned in passing in written sources by Nikola Zvonimir Bjelovučić (1929). On the basis of detailed comparative analysis of pre-Romanesque buildings in Dubrovnik and the surrounding area, an effort was made to indicate that the slab is a relief from the first half or middle of the 10th century. In terms of the number and relevance of early-medieval buildings discovered in the greater Dubrovnik area, pre-Romanesque sculpture is best represented in Dubrovnik. There are several hundred fragments of liturgical installations, mostly altar rails and ciboria, as well as architectural sculptures from load-bearing structural elements (supports and capitals), parts of portals and windows. Most of them were found in the southern, oldest part of the historic core of the city, and mostly in the church of St Peter the Great, the cathedral, the church of St Stephen, that of Our Lady of Mt Carmel on Pustijerna, and the Na Andriji urban area. Apart from Dubrovnik, the same type of sculpture has been found in Ston and on the Elafiti Islands. The wide repertoire of motifs and complex compositional schemes present on these reliefs made it easier to recognize the type of sculpture, so the well-preserved slab at the Three Churches in Boninovo, should be added to the rich corpus of the pre-Romanesque heritage of the Dubrovnik region. The high-quality stonework of the fragment in Boninovo can be seen in the strict and even distribution of the complex geometric scheme, with a series of knotted three-ribbon circles intertwined with triple diagonal bands. The even distribution of this relief, with sharply carved contours of three-ribbon bands and knots, as well as clearly defined and deeply carved spaces, reveals a stonemason with a steady and skilled hand, well trained in complex geometric interweaving. A similar composition can be found on several contemporary reliefs, with special attention paid to a fragment of a slab found near the church of St Andrew in Pile, because its ornaments and stonework are extremely similar to the slab in Boninovo. The paper shows the possibility that the larger slab of Boninovo and the smaller relief from Pile probably belonged to the same context of ecclestical equipment of the same monument. An effort was made to re-examine the provenance of the slab at the Three Churches in Boninovo, with a review of the phenomenon of dislocation of more representative fragments from the same period as the slab in question. On the basis of all the information presented in the paper, it was proposed that the origin of the well-preserved stone slab at Boninovo, as well as the related smaller relief from Pile, should be linked to the historical core of the city, where most finds from that period of pre-Romanesque sculpture have been found. Given that it is a more representative fragment of larger dimensions and better quality, one could imagine that it was made for a more important city shrine, such as the church of St Peter the Great, the cathedral, or the church of St Stephen in Pustijerna.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
289898
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2022.
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