Dalmatia’s monuments of art as an inspiration to the Austrian travel literature

Abstract

The Croat province of Dalmatia was known for its monuments of art in the French and English travel literature of the 17th and 18th Century. The Austrian travel literature of that time had very few interests for monuments of art. As Austria was involved in a number of wars with the Turks, its travel books described meticulously topographic facts and forts of the Danube area. As Austria acquired the Croat province of Dalmatia in 1797 and definitely in 1814, the Emperor Franz I. visited Dalmatia in 1818 taking with hiis suite the archaelogist Anton Steinbuchel who had some interests for the ruins of the Roman city of Salona near Split by the imperial resolution. A period of stagnation until the forties followed that visit. With Heinrich Zschokke, who wrote a historic tale »Diokletian in Salona« (Aarau, 1843) a new interest rose for the antiquities of Dalmatia fostered by Heinrich Stieglitz, the German poet who visited Dalmatia in 1843. This animated the excavations in Salona in 1846. J. G. Kohl extended this interest to the monuments of the Middle Ages encouraging Rudolf Eitelberger on his travel in Dalmatia, which resulted in a crucial book about the monuments of the Middle Ages. But a real literary interest for the monuments of Dalmatia rose in the seventies and eighties of the past century. This was the period which followed the Austrian defeat in the war of 1866, when Austria was driven out of Germany and Italy and turned now to Dalmatia and the Levant. It was a fact of mere cultural interest, an intermediary between the culture of the Levant and Dalmatia and the central Europe. Alexander von Warsberg and Armand von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld wrote in that time each one book, which can be by certain means considered as forerunners of the Viennese neoromantic movement.