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A contribution regarding to the typology of late-renaissance fireplaces
Vanja Kovačić
; konzervatorski odjel Ministarstva kulture u Splitu
Sažetak
The furnishing of Dalmatian houses and palaces has mostly vanished from their former interiors. Built-in stone fireplaces were reutilised over the course of time, moved into new premises, or re-carved to be used as building material. The household fireplaces decorated with carvings, made of a stone architrave on pillars or on moulded feet, were almost as a rule disassembled and taken away over the last two centuries, and just a few rare specimens can be found in the original space. Over the architrave and the side walls, there was a hood (cappa) in the shape of a prism on which in rather luxurious interiors, allegorical scenes and the coat of arms or motto of a noble line would be painted.
Documents from the commune archives of central Dalmatia take us to commissions for fireplaces that were confided to local carvers, particularly from Brač and Korčula. For example, among the elements of architectural decoration for the Dešković Arbanasović House in Omiš in 1610, the carver Stjepan Bokanić from Pučišće made una nappa alla francese, 32 feet long. Mention is made of In carico e discarico de pilastri per camin while a house was being built for the poet Jeronim Kavanjin in Sutivan in 1692, and in 1698 Spesi in far camin, e la napa, cioè camin a campana. In bequests and property divisions, fireplaces were valued, along with stone cupboards, well heads and wash basins as valuable elements of interior decoration. When houses were pulled down, elements that had been worked with carving techniques were sold at auctions, and decorated fireplaces and coats of arms were particularly sought by traders in antiques and the richer bourgeoisie, and gradually vanished from these impoverished Dalmatian milieus.
On the site of the Gothic and Renaissance houses close to the civic castello to the south west of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, at the beginning of the 18th century, the monumental palace of the Milesi family was put up, modelled on Venetian Baroque palaces. In the interior of the palace there was one of the largest Dalmatian fireplaces, made of reddish marble of the Rosso Verona type. In the central part of the high architrave a smooth central zone with an elongated S moulding of Mannerist design stands out, emphasised by the dense moulding at the bottom and a sima at the top. The monolithic architrave has a finished corner, and special elements with the same moulding were assembled as lateral supports for the hood. In the centre of the architrave there is neither coat of arms nor ornament as there is on extant Gothic-Renaissance and mannerist fireplaces. Legs with a bas relief on the upper part have moulded shallow capitals. The lower part ends with a huge lion’s paw with claws on a square base. The front side of the mantelpiece is framed with a groove with a central convex fill, and on the lateral sides an inlet strip frames a shallow volute. This outstanding decorative element is part of the architectural decoration of the palace’s interior and probably belonged to the main salon that opens with a long balconade onto the square.
The fireplace consisted of five elements: architrave, lateral sides of the architrave and two mantelpieces; the right mantelpiece was broken into two parts – a volute and a lion’s paw – and was recently restored. The stone Rosso Verona is often called marble although in petrographic terms it belongs among the limestones. It has a vivid colour and layered texture with light blotches, easy to work, and after polishing and the application of wax has the brilliant appearance of marble. In Dalmatia it was particularly used in religious buildings, particularly for altars, and not so much in residential interiors. Because of the origin and the commercial connections of the Milesi family, as well as the stylistic features of the palace in the tradition of the Venetian late Baroque, the fireplace almost certainly arrived as an import from northern Italy. It belongs to the typology of fireplace that became common in the second half of the 16th century in Veneto, and is based on the treatises of Sebastiano Serlio and the architectural language of the theory of orders. A prototype for the vertical elements with developed volutes at the top and lion’s paws at the bottom was first provided by Serlio in 1537 (Libro IV, p. 157), which was a stimulus for the formulation of new rules for this architectural structure, applied by Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Palladio and Michele Sanmicheli.
In the second half of the 16th century it was taken over as the classic type of fireplace; on the front part of the pyramidal hood a rich sculptural superstructure modelled in plaster is projected/designed. Outstanding examples are of Bartolomeo Ridolfi in the Guarienti Palace in Verona and the Villa Rotonda near Vicenza, made by the workshop of Ottaviano Ridolfi, after drawings of Alessandro Vittoria. The architectural frame of the fireplace retained the typological simplicity with the more indented architrave moulding, while diversity was achieved by varying the colours of the different materials, ranging from the red tones of Rosso Verona to the grainy structure of granite and highly polished black bases. Throughout Veneto and particularly in Verona this type of fireplace lasted through the 17th century, with a large number of specimens made in local stone. The fireplace from the Milesi Palace has its roots in the same region, but without extant sources about the building it is not possible to determine if it was commissioned and made for the Split palace or bought from the demolished interior of some existing building.
Ključne riječi
fireplaces; Milesi Palace; Split; Rosso Verona; Sebastiano Serlio
Hrčak ID:
202794
URI
Datum izdavanja:
28.6.2018.
Posjeta: 1.267 *