In Search of the Historic, Cultural and Artistic Identity of the Schiavoni Artists: Vignettes from the History of Their Reception in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The author of the paper demonstrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography applied a number of identity stereotypes which were linked to the Slavs, Dalmatians, Illyrians, Morlachs, and Croats in contemporary literature and scholarship to three well-known Schiavoni artists: Andrea Meldola (Andrija Medulic), Niccolo dell’Arca and Giulio Clovio (Julije Klovic). For example, the qualifier ‘barbaric’, used to denote the work of Niccolo dell’Arca in sixteenth-century historiography from Bologna, represents one of the stereotypical characteristics about the Schiavoni which were frequent at the time. The first part of the article focuses on sixteenth-century interpretations of the Croatian and Macedonian identity (origin) of the famous painter of miniatures, Giulio Clovio (Julije Klovic) in the works of his contemporaries such as Giorgio Vasari and Francisco de Holanda, followed by those in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of Ivan Kukuljevic Sakcinski, Ivan Golub and Milan Pelc. Particular attention is given to the currently prevailing hypothesis that the Macedonian origin of Giulio Clovio (Julije Klovic) might have been invented with the aim of testifying to his artistic and ancestral rootedness in the classical world. The second part of the article deals with records about Andrea Meldola and Niccolo dell’Arca in the writings of Italian historiographers Girolamo Borselli, Cherubino Cherardacci, Carlo Ridolfi and Marco Boschini, all of whom tried to interpret specific stylistic features in the works of these two artists as a consequence of what one can call their genotype and phenotype. The author of the article draws particular attention to the appearance of the ideologeme concerning the barbaric character of Niccolo dell’Arca in the records of Girolamo Borselli (late fifteenth century) and Cherubino Cherardacci (sixteenth century).