engleski

Metal "pendant" from the locality of Dubrovnik Cathedral: form and function; origin, model, and usage

The archaeological locality of Dubrovnik Cathedral, excavated during the 1980s, yielded a large number of movable finds, that only recently meet their first systematic study. As a part of the ongoing project Discovering the Old Dubrovnik Cathedrals, starting in 2015, a hundred of thousands of objects were processed and analyzed, among which stand out a number of those that would require somewhat closer attention in an attempt to determine their typology and chronology. One of them is a metal ‘pendant’ formed as a bust, that was not previously studied or published, not even properly processed or documented. In the notes made during the excavations, we can only find a short record describing it as a bronze pendant of a church lamp. But, if we observe this object more closely, we can conclude that it was in fact used as a steelyard weight, more precisely as a sculptured copper-alloy casing of a lead core. Typically, that kind of weight was used as a part of the so-called speed balance, made in Roman tradition. Although there are numerous examples of this particular, anthropomorphic type of weight in the Eastern Adriatic region of the broader Roman period, our item stands alone in that group. Its formal and stylistic features direct us more to Byzantine analogies dated from the 4th/5th till the 7th/8th cc., form of which reflected not just commodities that were measured, but also who measured them. In that respect, one would connect the example from Dubrovnik either to the Church administration or to some economic activities set in the vicinity of the cathedral complex and/or managed by the Church. Still, in terms of iconography, our object represents unicum. Its form of a hybrid half-human, half-bird being, with female body features and manly facial characteristics leads us to classical models, that would seem peculiar in the context of the place of its discovery and even chronology of the earliest phases of the Dubrovnik cathedral, set in the transitional period from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. All the included facts open a series of questions considering the dating of the object, the context of the find, the place of its discovery and its usage there, but also the place of its production and the origin of the model, implying areas whit stronger cultural and artistic classical revival, present even in the onset of the Middle Ages.

metal "pendant", the locality of Dubrovnik Cathedral, steelyard weights, 4th/5th - 7th/8th cc.

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