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The
Rector
Pallace is placed just
next to the city hall and it is one of the
most significant monument of the secular architecture not only in
Dubrovnik but in on the entire Adriatic coast, built in mixture of
gothic and renascence style. Today’s palace was build on the 13th
(1272) century castellum – surrounded by four corner towers as a
defense fort. In the 14th century it vas reconstructed in to
palace, modeled
to look as
Venetian palaces
at
the time. The palace received its present form (a single-storey building
with four wings closing the courtyard - a portico with a small mezzanine
floor gallery and a large floor gallery) in the
mid-15th
century during the reconstruction
following the demolition of the old Rector's Palace in the gunpowder
explosion
in 1435. The new Rector's Palace was rebuilt in the
late-Gothic style by Onofrio de la Cava, an architect from Naples who
also built the waterworks and two public fountains in Dubrovnik
(1435-1440) and the statue on the building is probably the work of
Pietro di Martino, an architect and sculptor from Milan. After the
building sustained another major damage in 1463, again caused by
gunpowder explosion, and another one in the great fire of 1667 which
ravaged the town, reconstruction of the Rector's Palace was led by two
renowned artists: M. Michelozzo from Florence and Juraj Dalmatinac from
Zadar. It seemed that maybe, to conservative, Great Council
in
1464 refused Michelozzo’s ground plan because it was imagined to be too much of
Renaissance style, so the palace was not rebuilt according to
Michelozzo's design. Construction work then probably led the Florentine
architect Salvi di Michele until 1467, and Dalmatian masters Radivoj
Bogosalić and Nikola Marković chiseled biforas, while relief
scene on the palace portal is Pavko Antojević Bogićević masterpiece.
After 1667 earthquake, palace’s interior was rebuild up until the end of
the 17th century in Gothic style with some Baroque elements.
In the palace’s ground floor atrium there is the statue of Miho Pracat,
a wealthy and renowned sailor from the island of Lopud made by
P. Giacometti, a sculptor from Recanati. Due to leaving his savings to
the Republic, he has been the only citizen whom the
Dubrovnik Republic raised public
monument. Together with the rector’s office and his private room’s
palace, complex housed the state office, the notary's office, the law
court, the gaol, the armory, the court guard and the small Council hall.
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