Baroque in Croatia. Presentation of Baroque culture in Croatia in the socialist period

Abstract

This article analyses examples of the way in which Baroque art and culture was presented to broader audiences in Croatia while that country still formed a part of Yugoslavia. Such examples include the Croatia in the Seventeenth Century exhibition, which took place in 1958 at the City of Zagreb Museum, as well as texts giving an overview of the monuments of a number of municipalities in north-western Croatia published in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Anđela Horvat (1911–1985) in the journal Kaj. The above-mentioned exhibition reflected many key ideas of the 1950s, which constituted the formative period of socialist society’s cultural and artistic identity, all the way from its design set-up and its educational purpose to its ideologically determined emphasis, which concentrated on the subject of daily life in the seventeenth century. By the 1980s this ideologically determined emphasis was less present, leaving much more space for the analysis of Baroque monuments, as well as of the people who commissioned them – the nobility – who, in contrast to earlier times, were then seen as active participants in cultural and art life of the Baroque period.

Keywords

• Baroque
• Croatia
• Yugoslavia
• 1950s exhibitions
• topographical overview