Circulation, Use, Impact
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Book Series
Archipelagus, vol. 2
- Pages: 207 p.
- Size:216 x 280 mm
- Illustrations:14 b/w, 161 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2025
- € 50,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61522-6
- Hardback
- Available
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61523-3
- E-book
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This book follows the dynamics of sculptors' and stonemasons' production from the mid-15th century's embrace of early Renaissance influences to the introduction of Classical architectural language that occasionally breaks with the stylistic canons of artistic centres.
Subject(s)
BIO
Laris Borić is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Zadar, Croatia. His research explores the urban history, architecture, and visual arts of early modern cities on the Adriatic, with a special focus on how ideas and artistic vocabularies were transmitted, adapted, and transformed across cultural borders. He is also part of the European Research Council project Architectural Culture of the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic.
Summary
This book explores the transformation of Zadar’s architectural and visual culture at the dawn of the early modern era. Once a powerful medieval commune, Zadar was absorbed into the Venetian Republic just as Ottoman forces pressed through the Dalmatian hinterland. Caught between two worlds and facing economic decline, the city nonetheless remained a vibrant cultural hub.
Through the networks of builders, sculptors, and painters active across Dalmatia, Venice, Lombardy, and the Marche, Zadar’s elites embraced humanist ideals and reshaped their artistic practices. The result was a distinctive and sometimes unconventional reinterpretation of classical forms, visible above all in sculpture and architectural decoration—the ‘Renaissance stones’ of Zadar.
The study connects these fragmentary remains into a coherent whole, situating them within the broader Venetian sphere while reading them in their immediate social and cultural contexts. It offers a new understanding of how Renaissance art developed on the Adriatic frontier.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword, Jasenka Gudelj
Introduction: In between and on the Edge?
The Spatial and Temporal Setting
Material and Interpretative Issues: Fragmentation and Historiographical Incommunicability
Cultural Practices and Forms of Patronage
From Thriving Medieval City to a Fortress: Socio-Economic Transitions
Resetting Time: Zadar Humanist Circles
Strategies of State, Civic, and Family Patronage
Collective, Familial, and Individual Patronage
Trajectories of Style: Production and Protagonists
Bulk Cargo: The 15th-Century Lapidarium
Trajectories of Style: Protagonists in the Long 15th Century
Variations of Classical Vocabulary in the 16th Century
The Early-17th-Century Decline of Local Sculpture
Epilogue
The Rise and the Fall of Zadar Renaissance Architectural and Sculptural Production
Appendix: Fortuna Critica and Some Methodological Remarks
Archival Sources and Bibliography
Index of Places
Index of Names