Palazzo Rettorale and Torre del Orologio, Ragusa.
In a corner of the fine columniated court within the palace lies the monument of Orlando, whose exploits in slaying the Saracen Emir have been already recorded. Near it stood of old the banner of the second saviour of the Republic—San Biagio. In the middle of the court is a patinated bronze bust of a man with peaked beard and somewhat careworn expression, and, on the pedestal, the inscription ‘Michaeli Prazzato benemerito Civi ex S.C. MDCXXXVIII.’ Michael Prazzato was a well-deserving citizen indeed! He left no less than 200,000 Genoese doubloons to the Republic—a sum equivalent to 600,000l. of our money—but the actual equivalent of which in the present day would have to be reckoned in millions. Such were the merchant princes of Ragusa! But the monument, curiously enough, recorded the catastrophe as well as the prosperity of the city. On the back of the pedestal was a further inscription commemorating the overthrow of the bust by ‘the great earthquake,’ and its setting up anew. The head had been seriously caved in behind.
In the ‘Mother Church’ of the neighbouring, formerly Ragusan, island of Mezzo, is another memorial of Michele Prazzato, a napkin which once belonged to Charles V. At a time when Spain was desolated by a famine, Prazzato earned the gratitude of her sovereign by transporting there large cargoes of grain in his huge carracks. Hearing of Prazzato’s presence, the Emperor called him in, it is said, while he was shaving, and offered him a large sum of money,—titles, and office under his government. ‘Sire,’ replied our merchant prince, ‘if I am satiated with riches it is that I never took them as a gift; if I am king on board my carracks, it is that I never sought for honours; if I am a free citizen of my fatherland, Ragusa, it is that I have never sought for titles. As a remembrance of your sovereign favour, grant me rather this napkin.’[362] Charles V., struck at such greatness of soul, took what was asked for from beneath his beard and handed it to Prazzato.
But walled into a doorway at the side of Prazzato’s monument is another inscription recording patriotic devotion of a still higher order. Nicola Bunić[363] has well deserved the title of the Ragusan Regulus. It was after the great calamity of 1667, when Ragusa was beginning a new start in life, that Kara Mustapha, intent on strangling her new birth, sent in a monstrous claim for 146,000 dollars. The senate and citizens of Ragusa, who knew the personal animosity of Mustapha against the Republic, were in despair. At this critical juncture two citizens, who had already rendered themselves eminent by their efforts in remedying the effects of the earthquake and in repulsing the Morlach incursions, volunteered to risk their lives in averting the storm. One was Marino Caboga[364] and the other Nicola Bunić. On their arrival the Grand Vizier attempted to extract from them a treaty surrendering Ragusa to the Turk. They refused, and were thrown into noisome dungeons. Caboga, after languishing several years in captivity, was enabled to return to Ragusa and receive the acclamations of his fellow-citizens. This slab was the only homage which the Republic could offer to Bunić. The inscription, Englished, is as follows:—‘To Nicola Bunić, a Senator of singular discreetness, who, in the most perilous times of the Commonwealth, undertook of his own accord a most perilous embassy to the neighbouring Pashà of Bosnia, and being sent on by him by way of Silistria to the Turkish Sultan, there, after long imprisonment, died in chains for the liberty of his country, and who by his death and constancy of soul hath earned an immortal name through all posterity; to the honour and memory of whom this monument is by decree of the Senate set up, in the year 1678.’[365]
Near the Palazzo Rettorale rises the Duomo of St. Mary—but alas! except the foundations on which the present building rests, not one stone has been left upon another of Cœur-de-Lion’s original cathedral. In the present eighteenth-century Italian edifice there is little to arrest the attention; but the Reliquiario[366] is wonderful! When Ragusan commerce was at its acmè, ‘the merchants of the Republic,’ we read, ‘collected the precious relics of the saints from all parts of Thrace, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, and Greece, where they had business, following the promptings of their piety; sometimes at their own expense, sometimes at the expense of the Republic, rescuing them from barbarism and ignorance.’ Hither, too, when the Infidel overran the South-Sclavonic lands, pious votaries carried for safety what was more precious to them than worldly goods or life itself. Here, in the City of Refuge, are gathered together the penates of the Serbian people. Among the most interesting of these national relics was the silver cross of Czar Dūshan, which is double, like the Hungarian. It is set in front with crystals, and covered with volute filigree work; at the back with vine ornaments. As to St. Blasius, there seemed enough relics of the patron saint of the Republic to make several originals, if pieced together! An Oriental crown enclosing a piece of his cranium, brought hither from the East in the eleventh century, is a master-piece of Byzantine art. Then there is a very choice fragment of John the Baptist’s arm, which was added to the collection in 1452; under, to say the least of it, remarkable circumstances. The Ragusans had taken care of it for a sick Bosniac, who had promised his precious relic to the Florentines. The Bosniac recovered his health; but, as neither Papal thunders nor Tuscan threats availed him to recover the smallest fraction of St. John the Baptist, he turned for help to Bajazet. Bajazet referred the matter to one of his Pashàs, and the Turk, no doubt richly bribed by the Ragusans, cut the matter short by observing to the claimant that if he was in want of Christian bones he might pick up plenty on the field of Kóssovo!
Although as Englishmen we could get up no particular enthusiasm for St. Blaze’s collar bones, the cases were magnificent, and the ancient filigree work of Ragusa particularly struck us. In general appearance the later specimens of the Ragusan silversmith’s art resemble Maltese work, and effloresce into the same flowers and foliage. But the taste for the natural, which followed on the revived study of antiquity, displays itself here still more conspicuously in the development of a kind of silver Palissy-ware by the hands of a great Ragusan master. The most wonderful objects in the Reliquiario are a silver basin and ewer, wrought in the fifteenth century by a Ragusan artist, Giovanni Progonović,[367] in a style so original, that I doubt if anything at all resembling it has even been attempted elsewhere. These are covered with all kinds of shells, creeping things, flowers, and foliage—elegant lizards, not like those that the great potter moulded at his best, but perfectly animate—such as the Neapolitan casts from the living creature. Nay, more, the most perfect mechanism is added to perfect art, and if water be poured into the basin the little creatures move as if they were alive! Everything is enamelled of its natural colour, and though now somewhat diminished in brightness, you have actually to touch the plants and animals to realize that they are not real lizards or fern-leaves preserved in some way. In the vase is a nosegay of silver grasses, each delicate thread, each minutest seed, perfectly reproduced and coloured; among them I recognised a beautiful three-spiked grass that I had noticed growing in the neighbourhood of Ragusa—so true, so indigenous, is this art!