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THE OCTAGONAL LACONICUM WITH NICHES IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF DUBROVNIK
Nada Grujić
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Sažetak
This paper analyzes two bathrooms in Dubrovnik which have a central room built on an octagonal plan, with semi-circular niches placed on opposite diagonal sides. One of the bathrooms is in the Sorkočević villa in Rijeka dubrovačka, the other in the Bishop's Summer residence in Ploče. In both cases the architectural form of an octagon is found in a context characteristic of the Renaissance period, and especially of those Renaissance architects who followed classical Roman architectural models. The existence of octagonal rooms with niches in Dubrovnik brings up numerous questions of form and content which cannot be divorced from the context of architectural typology and the use in Renaissance times of all the varieties of this form known from classical times, including bathing. The private baths and laconicums ("stews") located in Renaissance palaces and villas are studied in this text in order to see in what measure the renewal of the Roman bathing procedure was related to the specific architecture of bathrooms in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Among these a special place must be given to the baths built in Genoa by Galeazzo Alessi and his followers, in which the classical model of the thermal space was followed in both plan and decoration, as a rule including an octagonal room with niches. Already in the sixteenth century, and especially in the seventeenth, Alessi's bathrooms were included in numerous books on the architecture of Genoese palaces and villas, which helped their dissemination outside Italy and thus also in Dubrovnik. In the villas of Dubrovnik one finds the room arrangement characteristic of the Genoese examples. However, while in Genoa some octagonal rooms with niches and domical vaults were used as hot rooms (caldario, bagno caldo), in both Ragusan examples they were used as "stews" — laconicums. In the Genoan baths all the niches have benches and the pool is situated in a separate small square space (with one or two niches). They were heated both by hypocaust and hot air circulating inside the walls. The bath of the Bishop's villa is situated in one of the corners of the ground floor: its furnace is under the staircase, and the cistern lies under the terrace, outside the perimeter of the house. Being allotted and limited in advance, the space of this octagonal laconicum had to adapt to such conditions which resulted in its somewhat shorter diagonal sides. The bath in the Sorkočević villa is placed in a separate building added for this purpose to the large gallery of the villa. It is situated on two floors the furnace and cistern on the ground floor, the laconicum in the shape of a completely regular octagon along with a smaller square space with pool, on the first floor. The bath is here completely separated from the bedrooms and belongs to the most representative part of the villa. There are no archive data telling us either the dates when the Dubrovnik baths were built or the names of their architects, so this study concentrates on typological connections and the temporal framework in which this architectural "transfer" could have ocurred. The fact that these two baths were not built from one design, but were the application of a certain type of bath to two different spaces, leads to the conclusion that they were built by a foreign architect. This thesis is also supported by the complex technological arrangements necessary for the functioning of such spaces In these Ragusan bathrooms the bathing was not reduced to the simple needs of personal hygiene. Here several persons took their bath together, and this allows us to speculate about the social and intellectual functions of this ritual It thus becomes possible to speak of the Ragusan baths as reflecting attempts to imitate the Roman bathing ritual in a space recalling Roman architecture not by imitating it directly, but through the intermediary of Genoese post- allessian architecture. Once the procedure was re-established, the bathroom became a status symbol and did not depend on changes of architectural fashions in the subsequent periods.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
153830
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.12.1994.
Posjeta: 898 *