Proceedings

Discovering Dalmatia: Dalmatia in Travelogues, Images, and Photographs

Katrina O’Loughlin, Ana Šverko, Elke Katharina Wittich (eds.)


Editors
Katrina O’Loughlin, Ana Šverko, Elke Katharina Wittich

Manuscript Editor
Sarah Rengel

Manuscript Formating
Lina Šojat

Graphic Editor
Damir Gamulin

Volume Reviewers
Joško Belamarić, Marko Špikić

Reviewers
Ivan Alduk, Dalibor Blažina, Mateo Bratanić, Iain Gordon Brown, Suzana Coha, Franko Ćorić, Arsen Duplančić, Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, Sandra Križić Roban, Bratislav Lučin, Ivana Mance, David McCallam, Goran Nikšić, Milan Pelc, Mirko Sardelić, Vladimir Simić, Josip Vrandečić, Danko Zelić, Philip Zitzlsperger, Andrej Žmegač

Translation
Mejra Kaliterna, Mina Mušinović, Martina Petrinović, Sarah Rengel, Joanna Rowe

Bibliography and Index
Lina Šojat

Design and Layout
Damir Gamulin

Publisher
Institute of Art History, Zagreb, 2019

Print
Tiskara Zelina

Material description
410 pp.; color illus.

ISBN 978-953-7875-46-6

Here you can download impressum, contents, acknowledgments, preface, and list of contributors (pdf, 797 kb).

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Discovering Dalmatia brings together twelve texts offering new interpretations of conceptions of the space, natural beauty, and cultural heritage of Dalmatia as a destination for educated travellers from the late seventeenth to the first half of the twentieth century. (…) It includes analyses of accounts by a wide range of travellers, from Jacob Spon, Robert Adam, Aleksander Sapieha, Ludwig Salvator, Franz Thiard de Laforest, numerous Viennese painters and Art History students, to Gertrude Bell and Bernard Berenson. (…) Before us is a book in which the “view from the outside” is considered in a critical, comparative, and contextual way. Dalmatian spaces are thus integrated once more into European spaces, in which the interest in this forgotten or unfamiliar, not to mention exotic, land first appeared during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The interpretations of the travelogues – from manuscripts and printed books to sketches, graphical representations, pictures, and photographs – focus on the shattering of prejudices, culture shocks, and the aesthetic experiences of a generation of European intellectuals, which allow contemporary readers to understand the value of this complex space, and to understand the establishment of the cultural and natural heritage of the Croatian coastal region.

From a review by Marko Špikić

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The publications arising from the Discovering Dalmatia colloquia compellingly outline just how significant Iter Dalmaticum is for the global study of the Grand Tour. The conferences have uncovered a small constellation of European researchers who, with ever more precise insights and analytic nuances, studied the local monuments, geography, mentality, folk costumes, customs, and ultimately the perspectives of this little-known province on the edge of European civilisation. (…) This collection of papers demonstrates the way that knowledge about Dalmatia was changed and exchanged in the period spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth century. (…) The powerful intellectual curiosity and erudition of the travellers, as well as the emotion awakened by the balance between nature and picturesque architectural complexes, resulted in compelling personal impressions and subtle notes on the nature of the Dalmatia of the past. Scholarly studies gradually moved from their original focus on the Greek and Roman monuments that formed Dalmatia’s foundations to include an interest in the heritage of medieval municipalism, towards a discussion of the defining of national identity, and to an interpretation of Dalmatian monuments, which represent the distinctive contribution this extremely complex cultural environment made to the universal history of European civilisation.

From a review by Joško Belamarić

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CONTENTS

8
Acknowledgments

12
Ana Šverko
Preface: A Collage of Fragments

22
Elke Katharina Wittich
On Towns and People: Traditions of Describing and Depicting Dalmatia and South-Eastern Europe from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

70
Jean-Pierre Caillet
A French Humanist’s First Impressions of Istria and Dalmatia: The Account of a Voyage by Jacob Spon, 1678

90
Colin Thom
‘This Knotty Business’: The making of Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian (1764), revealed in the Adam brothers’ Grand Tour correspondence

116
Cvijeta Pavlović
Correctio descriptionis: Lovrić vs. Fortis

140
Magdalena Polczynska
Who is Observing and Who Describing?: Travels to the Slavic Lands by Aleksander Sapieha

170
Nataša Ivanović
Framed Views of Dalmatia

198
Irena Kraševac
Views of Dalmatian Cities and Architectural Monuments for the Publication The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures – Volume Dalmatia

226
Sanja Žaja Vrbica
Archduke Ludwig Salvator von Habsburg’s Travel Writing from the Region of Dubrovnik

250
Hrvoje Gržina
Nineteenth century Dalmatia inverted in the camera: photographic glass plate negatives by Franz Thiard de Laforest

278
Dragan Damjanović
Politics, Photography and Architecture: The University of Vienna’s First Study Trip (Erste Wiener Universitätsreise) and Monuments on the Eastern Adriatic Coast

308
Katrina O'Loughlin, Ana Šverko
Gertrude Bell’s Spring in Dalmatia, 1910

354
Joško Belamarić, Ljerka Dulibić
Bernard Berenson’s Journey to Yugoslavia and along the Dalmatian Coast (1936)

386
INDEX

392
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

400
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS