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Fragments of Early Christian ScuIpture from Novalja
Magdalena Skoblar
; University of York, History of Art department
Sažetak
Twenty years ago A. Šonje published several Early Christian reliefs in his paper on Late Antique art and architecture on the island of Pag. In this often cited paper, A. Šonje gathered all the information he was able to find in the scholarly literature as well as the results of his own archeological research. The Late Antique sites coincide with the settlements on the northern part of the island of Pag such as Novalja, Stara Novalja and Caska which occupies the location of the Roman Cissa. However, the Early Christian phase was discovered only in Novalja which boasts as much as three Early Christian churches — two cemeterial ones at Jaz and Gaj, and the large basilica within the walls that was most probably dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Among the scattered finds unearthed accidentally on the site of the long destructed basilica of St Mary in the 1950s, A. Šonje mentions a couple of interesting Early Christian reliefs and believes that both of them belonged to two different fifth-century screen slabs, one of them even made of marble. The supposedly marble fragment is decorated with scales or squamae, as they were called, while the other fragment published by A. Šonje as the fragment of a different screen slab, is ornamented with a vegetaI motif with ivy leaves and a small pilaster strip carrying a leaved capital. After a more careful analysis undertaken in the local collection Stomorica, where these reliefs are kept today, it became clear that the marble fragment mentioned by A. Šonje is actually made of limestone. In addition, a very similar fragment housed in the collection, decorated with a lozenge pattern, seems to belong to the same altar screen, which has been unnoticed before.
The fragment decorated with the ivy and the pilaster strip, on the other hand, surely did not belong to an Early Christian screen slab firstly because contemporary screen slabs never had such a decoration and secondly, because identical decoration has been attested elsewhere, on the Early Christian sarcophagi of the architectural type. The closest parallels can be found at Aquileia and Novigrad, where the same vegetal motif with ivy leaves and the same shallow pilaster strips with leaved capitals decorate the sides of the two sarcophagi already attributed to the same workshop. Although it was suggested by F. Ciliberto that the Aquileian sarcophagus might be of the fourth-century date, the fragments from Novalja and Novigrad probably belong to a later date, that of the 5th century, due to the overall archeological contexts of these two places.
Such an interpretation of these Early Christian reliefs, found on the site of the basilica of St Mary at Novalja, sheds a different light on the interior decoration of the basilica itself. Unlike A. Šonje had thought, the basilica did not have a marble altar screen but a limestone one decorated with squamae and lozenges, and it did not have two dissmilar screens at the same time, as he had believed, since the fragment with the vegetaI motif he had published as an altar screen fragment has proven to be a fragment of the architectural sarcophagus, the kind of which had been produced at Aquileia and popular throughout the northern Adriatic basin.
Ključne riječi
Pag; Novalja; Early Christian sculpture; relief; sarcophagus
Hrčak ID:
167783
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.12.2006.
Posjeta: 1.713 *