engleski

Rome in Croatia, via Tyrol

After 1730, quite suddenly and at a large scale, in northern Croatia appeared new motives and solutions that originated in Roman fresco paintings of the previous century: Pietro da Cortona’s stucco finto and quadro riportato illusions, Andrea Pozzo’s painted (illusionistic) architecture: vaults, domes and altars. Moreover, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s engaging Baroque gran gesto, translated into huge fresco painting narratives inhabited church walls, as well as quotations from his famous sculptural ensembles (illusionistic lodges with viewers from the St. Teresa of Avila chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome). All these stylistic novelties for the local experience were introduced by a Tyrolese painter Ioannes Baptista Rangger (Götzens 1700 – Lepoglava 1753), who arrived to northern Croatia – that was after a century and a half liberated from the Ottoman presence at the nearby border – and became a Pauline friar in the central Pauline monastery, Lepoglava. His arrival to Croatia with the baggage of the visual language of the Tyrolese fresco painting that was saturated with the Roman canons, changed the notion of the fresco decoration in Croatia. Rangger’s migration to Croatia was preceded by another one with similar effect, that of Tyrolese painter Egid Schor, who returned from Rome to Tyrol around 1666, after a decade spent there, mostly in the workshop of Pietro da Cortona. But this was not the only Rangger’s source on the Roman style, since there is a document in the Tyrolese Land Archive in Innsbruck mentioning his own voyage to Italy (1720), testifying that he is in Welschlandt begaben – gone to Italy. Unlike Schor, Rangger did not return to his native Tyrol in the west of the Habsburg Monarchy, since by the first decades of the 18th century the baroquisation of the major churches there was completed and village parish churches did not offer enough jobs to the growing number of Tyrolese artists. He became part of the Tyrolese artistic diaspora, settling down in the southern part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Rangger’s voyage to Italy and subsequent arrival in northern Croatia – as well as the Schor’s Roman period before – were not mere journeyman years (Wanderjahre), since they both had not only completed their education as craftsmen, but were so deeply imbued with the Roman Baroque that they became efficient agents in spreading its fame, themes, style and persuasive splendour far beyond the palaces and churches of the Papal Rome.

Baroque, fresco painting, Ioannes Baptista Rangger

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