The two stately piles at each end of the town—the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries—have fortunately preserved much of their original character. The latter was begun after the destruction of the first Franciscan house outside the Porta Pile by the Slaves in 1319, and the new building was erected just within the gate, which its inmates were to guard in times of danger. The church and a large part of the monastery have been rebuilt since the earthquake, although here and there a few interesting details remain. Thus on the south side, opening on to the Stradone, there is a handsome doorway in the Venetian Gothic style, surmounted by a Pietà, a very fair piece of sculpture; the date is probably the end of the fifteenth century. In the sacristy we find a Renaissance lavabo of carved stone. The campanile marks the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. The east window of the lower story and those on the second story are Venetian Gothic, while the south window of the lower story is round-arched. The top story with the cupola was rebuilt after the earthquake. But it is in the cloister that the chief interest of the building lies, a cloister which Mr. T. G. Jackson calls “one of the most singular pieces of architecture I have ever seen.”[263] Here we observe the most notable feature of Dalmatian architecture in all its force, for although its date is later than 1319 it is thoroughly Romanesque in character, and all the arches are round. It consists of a courtyard with three bays opening out into it on each side; the openings are divided into six round-headed lights, each head being pierced by a large circular light. A series of coupled octagonal shafts standing one behind the other, with a common base and common abacus, but separate capitals, serve as mullions to the arches. The capitals are extremely quaint and curious. Each one is different from its fellows, and the architect seems to have let his fancy run riot in designing them, “recalling the wildest and most grotesque fancies of early Romanesque work.”[264] Some are adorned with simple foliage, spiral volutes, and block leaves, but on others we find hideous grinning faces, dragons, strange uncouth monsters, masks, dogs, and all manner of fanciful ornaments. Judged by ordinary standards, we should take them to be work of the twelfth or thirteenth century, but as a matter of fact they are of a much later date. According to Eitelberger, these early forms were preserved in most of the monasteries of the East when they had given place to Gothic in Western Europe.[265] The workmanship of these capitals, like much Ragusan carving, is somewhat rough and unfinished, but for this the material, which is not sufficiently hard, may be partly responsible. Of the open circles in the heads of the opening, the centre one on each side of the cloister is larger, and ornamented with a rich border of acanthus leaves; the others are cusped. Possibly it was intended that they should all contain some ornamentation, and indeed the large round openings look somewhat bare. Above the cloister is an elegant balustrade, of which only one side survived the earthquake, but a few years ago it was restored according to the original design. The name of the architect has been preserved in an inscription in the cloister itself:
☩ S · DE · MAGIST
ER MYCHA PETRAR
DANTIVAR QVIPPE
CITCLAVSTRVM
CVM OMNIBVS SVIS.
He was one Mycha of Antivari, a town where Byzantine influence was stronger than at Ragusa. The inscription has no date, but it is close to two others of 1363 and 1428, and the style of the lettering, according to Jackson, is even earlier than 1363. The building was not begun until after 1319, when the former Franciscan monastery was destroyed, so that the date is somewhere between 1319 and 1363. Within the enclosure are orange trees and evergreen shrubs, and a graceful little fountain is placed in the centre; the whole scene forms a most charming picture of mediæval monastic life. A second cloister higher up the hillside served as a garden where the simples for the monks’ pharmacy were grown. This, too, is a delightful old-world nook.
At the opposite end of the town, just inside the Porta Ploce, stands the massive group of the Dominican church and monastery. These buildings originally formed the southern bulwark of the town, the monks themselves, like the Franciscans, being entrusted with the defence of the gate; but later a second wall was built outside it. The church, which was begun in 1245 and completed in 1360, consists of a vast nave separated from a polygonal choir by a high arch. The building is extremely bare; the traces of Gothic arches and clustered pillars form a sort of skeleton, around which the existing church was constructed in the seventeenth century. In the sacristy there are a few more fragments of early work, and the south doorway, with a round arch of many receding orders under an ogee crocketed hood mould, also belongs to the original church. Jackson notices a strong flavour of German Gothic in it. There are several pointed windows of extreme simplicity, and a large round one decorated with an outside frill of small Venetian arches. The campanile was begun in 1424[266] by Fra Stefano, a Dominican, but it was not completed in 1440, for De Diversis says of it, “nondum perfectum, in dies crescit.” It has round arches and shafts set back to the centre of the wall.
But as in the Franciscan monastery, the cloister is almost untouched. It is an irregular square, with five bays on each side, each bay being divided by three lights, the head pierced by two irregular lights above. The style is a curious medley “of Gothic and Renaissance, of forms understood and otherwise, as indeed could only occur in a land which, being on the borders of Eastern and Western culture, did not possess the power to create and execute the various styles correctly.”[267] The arches of the bays are round, but the inside work has more the character of Venetian Gothic, especially in the foliage. The shield of the semicircular head is pierced by quatrefoil lights encircled alternately with an ornament of interlacing circles almost Byzantine in character. The Dalmatian architect had doubtless seen Gothic work in Italy, but “had failed to grasp the idea of receding orders in the arch, or consistent mouldings in his tracery.”[268] The columns with their caps and bases are of a severely antique character. But in spite of all deviations from architectural orthodoxy this cloister, set off by cherry and orange trees and evergreen shrubs, is, after the Franciscan cloister, one of the loveliest monastic buildings in Dalmatia.
The secular buildings, with one notable exception, belong to a later period. The exception is the Sponza[269] or custom house, a large part of which was built in the early fourteenth century. It stands at the end of the Stradone, opposite the Piazza and the church of San Biagio, and consists of three stories built round a courtyard. The ground floor and first floor were probably built in the first years of the thirteenth century.[270] The top story, the façade, and the portico belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The oblong courtyard is surrounded on the lower story by vaulted arcades of round arches with square soffits supported on short plain solid octagonal columns, without bases (like those of the Ducal Palace at Venice), and short capitals opening out into square abaci. The second story is also arcaded, and has twice as many window openings as the lower story has arches, round at the two ends and pointed on the sides, with square piers over the columns below and round columns over the centres of the arches; their capitals are adorned with foliage, some à crochet, and some with deflected leaves at the angles. According to Jackson, all this part is of the same period, in spite of the fact that some of the openings are round and some pointed. The general effect is one of extreme simplicity and sobriety; it is, as Jackson says truly, “an admirable piece of plain, useful, and not ungraceful architecture, not too showy for the commonplace purposes of the building, and yet well proportioned and carefully built.”[271] Round the courtyard are the various warehouses, over the doors of which are the names of different saints. Above the end arch is the inscription:—
FALLERE NRA VETANT ET FALLI PONDERA MEQ.
PONDERO CVM MERCES PONDERAT IPSE DEVS.
The early work ends with the moulded stringcourse above the second story; the third story, which has plain square windows, bears the date 1520 and the monogram
