Architettura e diplomazia tra Roma e Dubrovnik: San Girolamo dei Croati e la cattedrale di Dubrovnik nel secondo Seicento

The church of San Girolamo degli Illirici (now dei Croati) in Rome with its adjacent buildings represented and still represents a reference point for its associated national community, even assuming representative functions. In the early modern era, these institutions played an important role in artistic exchanges between Rome and the eastern Adriatic coast. Between the 1660s and 1670s, the architectural choices promoted by members of the Confraternita degli Illirici determined not only the type of multipurpose building adjacent to the church, a building that unfortunately was lost during Mussolini’s demolitions in the 1930s, but also the design and reconstruction of the new cathedral of Dubrovnik after the 1667 earthquake. This essay identifies the common protagonists of the material and stylistic renewal of the headquarters of the Illyrian confraternity in Rome and the archbishop’s church of Dubrovnik: the learned Abbot Stefano Gradi from Dubrovnik (custos of the Vatican Library) and the architect Pier Andrea Bufalini from Urbino, little known until now. Based on a detailed study of their networks of personal contacts, it outlines the social and artistic context of the patron and architect, identifiable in the circle of Queen Christina of Sweden and her artistic advisor, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, as well as Monsignor Virgilio Spada, former papal adviser on architectural issues, and the priest-architect Giuseppe Paglia. The project for the new apartment building «with some elegance» for the Illyrian community in Rome, overlooking the Ripetta port, thus aimed to give a new face to the nation. Taking part in the lively construction activity that embellished and improved the centre of Rome under Alexander VII, the Illyrians proposed structures around which a new building typology was modelled, that of rental apartments, developed particularly by pious institutions and confraternities during the seventeenth century. Abbot Gradi and the architect Bufalini considered various proposals for financial and construction procedures while planning the project, participating with their building site in the redevelopment process that affected the entire Ripetta area during the Seicento and especially the Settecento, ultimately forming a new visual identity for the nation. The architectural program of the new cathedral of Dubrovnik, drawn up in Rome by Stefano Gradi and Pier Andrea Bufalini following the earthquake of 1667, in fact, imported the symbolic value of «Roman» architecture into a country on the eastern border of Catholic Europe. Together with his patron, Bufalini developed a system for remote work, creating a network that saw models, plans, instructions and calculations travel, foreshadowing a practice that would become systematic in Carlo Fontana’s studio. Thanks to the analysis of documents held at the Dubrovnik State Archives and stylistic analysis of the building, we can count the cathedral as an important example outside Rome of Bellori’s postulates regarding architecture. Finally, the analysis of the architecture permits a reconstruction of the oeuvre of Pier Andrea Bufalini, while the reconstruction of his links with Gradi and with the Illyrians in Rome allows us to show the role of a national community in Rome in the export of the «Roman manner» understood in terms of identity. The case analyzed here enriches the panorama of artistic exchanges between Rome and southeastern Europe, allowing us to identify the mechanisms and strategies employed, which form fully-fledged components of so-called artistic diplomacy.