FAMOUS CROATS 2005 - 300TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF JURAJ ĆULINOVIĆ

Juraj Ćulinović (Giorgo Schiavone, Gregorio Schiavone) (Skradin between 1433 and 1436 – Šibenik, December 6th, 1504) Renaissance painting in Dalmatia belongs to the noblest chapters of the Croatian art history. Among the protagonists we also find Juraj Ćulinović, born in Skradin between 1433 and 1436, trained in the workshop of the painter from Split, Dujam Vušković, (1400-1458/59), and at the Paduan atelier of Francisco Squarcione (1397 – 1468). We know much more about the painting of one of the best known “Schiavones”, the epithet the Italians used to refer to him and all other artists born along the Croatian coast, from the works that are preserved and kept in world museums and collections than from those that can be found in Croatia. Outside Croatia all his signed works are being preserved – the polyptych from St.Francis’s church in Padua is kept in the London National Gallery, the centrepiece of the polyptych from St.Nicholas’s church in Padua is kept in Berlin’s Staatliches Museum, while the side panels of the polyptych are situated in the Paduan cathedral, two paintings with the representations of the Blessed Virgin Mary are kept in Turin, in its Pinacoteca Sabauda, and in the Walters Gallery in Baltimore. Finally, the well-known portrait of a man shown in profile is placed in the Musée Jacquemart-Andre in Paris. In all the larger museums, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the National Gallery in London or the Correr Museum in Venice, there are further works preserved that are attributed to the artist, all of them mostly iconologically connected with the frequent Renaissance theme of the Madonna with Child. Though the preserved archive sources prove that Ćulinović stayed and worked in Zadar (1461/62) and Šibenik (between 1443 until his death on the 6th of December 1504), the only painting attributed to him in Croatia is the painting of the Blessed Virgin with Child from the St.Laurentius’s monastery in Šibenik. Some people know him on account of the appropriation of drawings from the Squarcione collection in Padua, others know him as the son-in-law of Juraj Dalmatinac (Georgius Dalmaticus) whose daughter Jelena he married in 1463 when he opened his painters’ workshop in Šibenik. Ćulinović, however, can be recognized as an author characterized by a distinctive visual expression, in a way bound to the Gothic tradition by his hieratical golden backgrounds of his compositions where, within the narrow frameworks of vertical formats, he painted slightly bizarre images of saints, made lively by discrete mime and gestures, prominent in front of the background plane by an almost sculptural lighting modelling of the face, body and draperies.