Through Archival Records: The Making of Rendić’s Monument to Ivan Gundulić in Dubrovnik

Abstract

In 1893, on the site of today’s Gundulić Square in Dubrovnik, the monument to the poet Ivan Gundulić, realised by Ivan Rendić, was unveiled. At the time the monument was commissioned, Rendić was living in Trieste, where he had a studio and enjoyed a reputation as one of our finest sculptors. The most intensive correspondence between the sculptor and the Committee for Raising a Monument to Gundulić occurred from January 1892, when the contract was concluded, until June 1893, when the monument was installed and unveiled. The design for the monument was sent to the Committee in March 1892. The statue of Gundulić was completed at the beginning of 1893, but it was not cast in bronze until May of that year and three of the reliefs from the base of the monument had still not been cast in bronze by the time of the ceremonial unveiling. Rendić reworked the reliefs several times — in some cases to meet the requirements of the commissioners, such as the relief Liberty, and in others because of his own dissatisfaction with the result, as with the relief depicting the abduction of Sunčanica, whose composition he was still modifying in April 1893. The relief depicting St Blaise was completed in Vienna in March 1893, while the relief The Triumph of Vladislav was completed and cast in bronze in April 1893. Rendić produced most of the clay models in Trieste during 1892, and the bronze reliefs on the monument are therefore dated to that year, except for the relief depicting St Blaise, which bears the date 1893. The plaster casts of the reliefs, patinated to resemble bronze and installed on the monument, had to be cast in 1893. In October of the same year, they were replaced with bronze reliefs cast in Vienna, and the monument was finally completed. Two of the plaster reliefs are today preserved in the Collection of Miscellanea of the Cultural History Museum of the Dubrovnik Museums. The casting of the statue and the reliefs in bronze was entrusted to Franz Xaver Pöninger, one of Austria’s most esteemed sculptors and bronze casters. The previously unnoticed Trieste stonemason Tamburlini executed the stone elements of the pedestal, while Rendić’s brother Vicko prepared the foundations and reinforcement for the installation of the monument. The shortage of funds, often em phasised in the sculptor’s letters, together with the artist’s bohemian nonchalance — noted by Luigi Cervellini, the Committee’s commissioner, in his reports on Rendić’s work — contributed to the prolongation of the monument’s production process.