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- Title
Visualizing past in a foreign country: image(s) of Schiavoni/Illyrians in Early Modern Italy.
- Authors
Gudelj, Jasenka
- Abstract
The Ragusan abbot and Vatican library guardian, Stjepan Gradić (1613-1683), acting as president of the Confraternity of St Jerome of Schiavoni/Illyrians in Rome, in 1660 wrote that rebuilding the block of houses next to the national church on Via Ripetta was necessary because «in tutta quella strada questo suo edificio sia il più infelice d'ogni altro, et espressivo di una certa barbarie, et ineleganza di costumi della quale molti, seben indebitamente, l'incolpano». A barbaric and inelegant the house or the natio itself? Gradić suggested that building a «casamento di qualche eleganza» would be an act of redemption of the very face of natio in front of foreign ambassadors, princes, cardinals, pilgrims, and others using Via di Ripetta - one of the streets leading from Piazza del Popolo, the ancient entrance to the Urbe from the north. The architecture and the works of art it contained were obviously considered the collective face of the national confraternity in question, and therefore, a synecdoche for the whole Early Modern natio in Roma communis patria, the city of foreigners3. Long before the idea of a nation-state had become predominant on a European scale, numerous foreign communities in Early Modern Rome and other cosmopolitan centers of the peninsula, typically organized in confraternities maintaining a chapel or a church, became representative institutions of their "nations". The image(s) of this pre-modern natio, as envisioned through their historical collectives, i.e. confraternities and colleges for students that existed throughout Early Modern Italy, was examined at an interdisciplinary conference organized by the Croatian Science Foundation research project Visualizing Nationhood: the Schiavoni/Illyrian Confraternities and Colleges in Italy and the Artistic Exchange with South East Europe (15th -18th c.) at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia, between 30th and 31st May 2017. It explored both visual and linguistic constructs produced or commissioned by members of Schiavoni/Illyrian institutions, questioning intentions and mechanisms behind their creation, as well as the reverberation of their meaning in different contexts. These phenomena were also regarded in a comparative perspective of similar expressions found in proto-national institutions of other foreign communities on the Apennine peninsula in the same period. The conference brought together scholars working in the fields of art history, history, visual, literary and material culture studies, thus broadening the existing understanding of Schiavoni/Illyrian proto-national identity.
- Subjects
HISTORIC preservation; PRESERVATION of historic buildings; ITALIAN architecture
- Publication
Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, 2018, p9
- ISSN
2039-2362
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.13138/2039-2362/1892