Original scientific paper
The Album of Photomechanical Reproductions with Dalmatian Motives – a Gift of the People's Education Society to Bishop Strossmayer
Ivana Katušić
; Strossmayer Gallery of Old masters of CASA, Zagreb, Croatia
Hrvoje Gržina
; Hrvatski drž
Abstract
The article provides new insights into less known album of photomechanical reproductions with motives of Dalmatia, presented to Josip Juraj Strossmayer on the occasion of his episcopal service by the People’s Education Society of Split. Lavishly furnished album is now kept in the Strossmayer Galery of Old Masters of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Even though it is not the case of author’s artistic expression, but of luxuriously bind choice of commercial photographs, the album is interesting as product of the last fashion of its time. In professional and wider cultural public, the album is almost forgotten, it is rarely put on display, and in seldom known mentions, it is wrongly identified as album of greeting cards, album of chromolitographies or album of colourised photographs.
Dalmatian associations with cultural and educational purpose of the nineteenth century have been mostly discussed in scholarship within the context of the so called “national renaissance” in Dalmatia, and their agency was primarily analysed through optics of agitation and mobilisation potential in the content between autonomist and annexing forces for gaining as wide support of the population as possible. The People’s Education Society of Split grew up at the end of the nineteenth century in the circle of proponents of Croatian national identity in Dalmatia, and many of the members of the Society, besides their activity on political plane, contributed to the work of more important and much older cultural and educational societies, in which shadow the People’s Education Society remained and consequently stayed outside of the focus of interest of the researchers. Because of that, besides the initial plan of providing professional analysis of the album presented by the members of the Society to Bishop Strossmayer, this article felt need to add at least elementary information on its foundation, composition of its members and its mission and in that manner delineate the context of this valuable present. Because of that, before the analysis of the album, the archival research of documents in the State Archive of Zadar and the archive of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art and research of contemporary press was conducted and they resulted with new information on both the history of the Society and cultural agency of Bishop Strossmayer. In that manner, this work, besides presenting full description of the album and correctly identifying to wider public rather unfamiliar photomechanical process, is also a contribution to the history of photography in Croatia and to the research of Croatian social and cultural history of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Keywords
Josip Juraj Strossmayer; People's Education Society of Split (Društvo za prosvjetu puka u Splitu); album; Brüder Nedomansky; photomechanical reproductions; photochromatics; Photoglob Zürich
Hrčak ID:
136444
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2014.
Visits: 1.545 *