The Artistic Patronage of the Confraternities of Schiavoni/Illyrians in Venice and Rome. Proto-National Identity and the Visual Arts

Abstract

Slavic people from South-Eastern Europe immigrated to Italy throughout the Early Modern period and organized themselves into confraternities based on common origin and language. The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of the images of the Schiavoni or Illyrian communities in Rome and in Venice in the fashioning and management of their confraternity, which played a pivotal role in the self-definition of the Schiavoni in Italy. The Scuola Dalmata dei SS. Giorgio e Trifone in Venice is mainly known for Vittore Carpaccio’s narrative cycle, relocated from the first provisory seat owned by the Venetian branch of Knights Hospitaller to the Scuola’s newly reconstructed mid-sixteenth century building. During the confraternity’s century-long existence, it continued to embellish its building: in the 17th and 18th century, the Sala superiore and the staircase leading to it were richly decorated with paintings. The church now known as San Girolamo dei Croati is the only surviving part of the complex once belonging to the Schiavoni/Illyrian confraternity in Rome. It was completely rebuilt by Sixtus V Peretti between 1586 and 1591 according to Martino Longhi the Elder’s designs and decorated extensively by a team of the so-called Sistine painters led by Giovanni Guerra. Like in Venice, the confraternity continued to embellish the church with commissions for the chapels and the hospital. These visual testimonies of programs promoted by members of the two most prominent Early Modern Schiavoni/Illyrian confraternities in Italy have never been thoroughly compared, mostly because of the obvious differences of their urban, political and artistic context. Nevertheless, shared origin, language and Catholic faith do provide a platform to discuss the notion of the “national saints” and Schiavoni strategies of differentiation from the Other in cosmopolitan urban and artistic centers of Venice and Rome.