Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 90 No. 5, 2020.
Original scientific paper
Bishop Strossmayer and the Gates of Heaven Sculpture at the Dominican Monastery in Dubrovnik
Ana Biočić
orcid.org/0000-0002-2894-4279
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
At the Monastery of St. Dominic in Dubrovnik there is a famous marble statue of baby Jesus sitting in the Virgin’s lap on the throne, authored by a famous Czech sculptor Václav Levý (1820 -1870), who founded the modern Czech sculpture school of the nineteenth century. This particular sculpture was bought by Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer of Đakovo in 1866, and its further path, leading to the Dominican Monastery in Dubrovnik, remains unknown to date. The article deals with the purchase of the sculpture found in the correspondence of Bishop Strossmayer with Nikola Voršak (1836 -1880), canon of the Chapter of St. Jerome in Rome, and kept in the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (CASA) and the Archdiocesan archives in Đakovo. This correspondence reveals the details on the purchase of the sculpture (bargaining during sale, expert valuation, papal blessing of the sculpture). The CASA Archives also keep the correspondence of Bishop Strossmayer with the author of the sculpture, Levý, which shows that they had known each other before the purchase itself.
Keywords
Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer; Dominicans in Dubrovnik; Gates of Heaven.
Hrčak ID:
251241
URI
Publication date:
28.1.2021.
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