Vladimir Peter Goss THE BEGINNINGS OF CROATIAN ART Published by Ibis grafika d.o.o. IV. Ravnice 25 Zagreb, Croatia Editor Krešimir Krnic This electronic edition is published in October 2020. This is PDF rendering of epub edition of the same book. ISBN 978-953-7997-97-7 VLADIMIR PETER GOSS THE BEGINNINGS OF CROATIAN ART Zagreb 2020 Contents Author’s Preface ........................................................................................V What is “Croatia”? Space, spirit, nature, culture ....................................1 Rome in Illyricum – the first historical “Pre-Croatian” landscape ...11 Creativity in Croatian Space ..................................................................35 Branimir’s Croatia ...................................................................................75 Zvonimir’s Croatia .................................................................................137 Interlude of the 12th c. and the Croatia of Herceg Koloman ............165 Et in Arcadia Ego ...................................................................................231 The catastrophe of Turkish conquest ..................................................263 Croatia Rediviva ....................................................................................269 Forest City ..............................................................................................277 Literature ................................................................................................303 List of Illustrations ................................................................................324 Illustration Credits ................................................................................334 Note on the Author ...............................................................................337 Author’s Preface his preface originally came into being as an eight page TEnglish summary to my book Početci hrvatske umjet- nosti (Zagreb: Ibis-grafika, 2020, 458 p.). As I have been keenly interested in making my work available to an inter- national community, I decided to expand that summary and post it on www.academia.edu. As I did so the text kept ex- panding and as it was growing and fattening it kept turning into another book. I let it be so. The Croatian mega-version deals with methodological issues concerning human creativity as a function of space (natura) and spirit (cultura) that I have been studying for decades. It is then applied to a body of material within a concrete space and engendered by a concrete human factor. The bulk of argument deals with representative monuments, evidence of their origin, date, and authorship, which, even- tually, leads to conclusions. The bulk of this “English Version” deals with conclu- sions referring back to the material evidence, sparingly, but I hope sufficiently, to support the conclusions. The Croa- tian version is a heavy, well-armed battle ship, reliable and steady, while the English one is a fast, penetrating destroy- er. If needed, anybody looking for more evidence could V Vladimir Peter Goss probably find it by resorting to some of the world language items listed in the Literature chapter. My note of thanks remains the same: to all of those who have ever helped me on my way, including critics and de- tractors, as those made me work ever harder. I remain equal- ly grateful to authors and owners of illustrations. They are duly acknowledged on a separate list. Zagreb, July 2020 VI What is “Croatia”? Space, spirit, nature, culture umans exist in space. By their presence they expose Hspace to human spirit. To be effective, a human being must be an agent of material and spiritual processes, phys- ical and spiritual manipulator of the space, as argued by Albury Castell in his notorious debate with Robert Skinner (Castell 1963). This is why I like the word “existence”; as it, to my belief, includes both material and spiritual, natu- ral and cultural, processes, both nature and culture, which jointly reflect our presence in the space, the locus of our “existence.” Culture and spirit are purposeless unless we have cast our anchor firmly within a specific space (Goss 2020; Goss 2016, 6-9). Croatia, the “Land of the Croats,” (Hrvatska, Hrvaška, Hrvatistan), is situated on the very south-eastern border of the Western, Latin, Judeo-Christian (both Catholic and Protestant) Europe (fig 1). This border, outlined by the riv- ers Drina and Danube and the Eastern Carpathian Moun- tains, was codified in 395 AD when the Roman Empire was split into its Eastern and Western half. Since then, it has undergone very small modifications. The Ottoman in- vasion in the 15th century moved the frontiers westwards, 1 Vladimir Peter Goss 1. Map of Croatia. encompassing Bosnia and Siebenbürgen. These two lands still stand as multi-ethnical tampons between two large sys- tems, Western and Eastern European, the latter with a dash of the Middle East Islam. The land of Croats has been a frontier, Antemurale Christianitatis, throughout its history: the last Western European country at the border of a differ- ent large system (Goss 2020, 117-119). By its geographic position Croatia belongs to three West- ern European regions: the Mediterranean (Eastern Adriatic and its hinterland), the Eastern Alps (their extreme exten- sions), and the Pannonian Basin. Thus it covers large and important sections of the Roman Pannonia and Dalmatia 2 THE BEGINNINGS OF CROATIAN ART (parts of a larger territorial unit, the Province, i.e. Prae- fectura of Illyricum). The present-day Croatia enters into history via Greek and Roman sources, which report on es- tablishing Greek and especially Roman domination over the local Illyrians and Celts. This process was finalized by the Roman occupation in 9 AD, when Illyricum became a Roman province (Goss 2016, 16-18). From the 4th century on, various Germanic, Asian and Slavic tribes settled in the area and by the end of the 6th century the Roman organization collapsed. The 7th and 8th centuries, with the exception of eastern Adriatic enclaves, were marked by Avar and Slavic conquests. The first Slavic colonizers settled in Illyricum in the context of these inva- sions. By the end of the 8th century, during the military in- terventions of Charlemagne against the Avars, the Croatian tribes - Frankish foederati - settled in Illyricum. Around the year 800 they created their own Principality within Fran- cia in the Eastern Adriatic and Southern Pannonia. During the subsequent three centuries (from ca. 800 to ca. 1100) a coherent political formation – the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia – emerged from this Slavic, Avar, Celtic, Latin, Greek, Frankish and Croatian ethnic material. The tripartite Kingdom continued as a sovereign political unit until the year 1918 when Croatia lost the symbol of its sovereignty, the Sabor (Parliament) within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). It was recreated with the formation of the 3 Vladimir Peter Goss Croatian Banovina (Vice-Royalty) in 1939, and continued as the Sabor of the wartime Antifascist Republic of Croatia. The present-day Republic of Croatia, member state of the EU, developed on this foundation (Goss 2020, 46-51; Goss 2016, 65). In the mountainous hinterland of the Eastern Adriatic, mostly within the Roman province of Dalmatia, there was a fourth unit of the tripartite Kingdom – Bosnia. Continuous, never completely successful, efforts by the Croatian and Hungarian-Croatian kings to expand their rule over Bosnia as a legitimate part of the Croatian kingdom demonstrate the fact that Bosnia was considered to be part of Croatian state. Bosnian sovereignty, comparable to that of the tripar- tite Kingdom is confirmed by the institution of ban (vice- roy), as a sovereign ruler under the supreme authority of the Hungarian crown, and respectfully, in the late Middle Ages, the Bosnian kings. The importance of Bosnia to the Croatian-Hungarian Commonwealth was demonstrated by the marriage of Elizabeta Kotromanić, daughter of the Bos- nian ban Stjepan Kotromanić (1322 – 1353) to the Hungar- ian-Croatian king Louis I of Anjou (1342 – 1382), possi- bly the most powerful European monarch at the time (Goss 2020. 269-270). The area of the present-day Republic of Croatia embodies much of the original tripartite Kingdom. Its western border moved towards the West; therefore, Croatia now encom- passes most of Istria. The borders in the Highlands, and 4 THE BEGINNINGS OF CROATIAN ART in the Eastern Alps remain virtually the same. The same applies to the northern border defined by the rivers Mura, Drava and Danube. The border along the rivers Sava and Una in the Croatian and Dalmatian Highlands reflects the old border between Croatia and Bosnia moved somewhat toward the West. Croatian Dalmatia extends to Privlaka, where it borders Montenegro. Together with Bosnia, Cro- atia is shaped as a regular rectangle, without it, its shape is an odd crescent. This by itself indicates the special position of Bosnia, i. e., it confirms the fact that Bosnia is really a separate fourth part of the tripartite kingdom, and, that due to its specificity, could be detached from the whole. De- spite enormous pressures, the tripartite kingdom has stayed together, whilst Bosnia (of course together with Herzego- vina), although bordering Croatia on three sides, developed in a different way. With or without Bosnia, Croatia clearly belongs to three different ecosystems. Starting from the coastline, the terrain soars to the first, and tallest,