Table Of ContentVladimir Peter Goss
SPACE: SENSE AND SUBSTANCE
< e-publication >
Vladimir Peter Goss
Space: Sense and Substance
Publisher
Rijeka: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
For the publisher
Ines Srdoč-Konestra
Editor
Maja Cepetić Rogić
Reviews
Vesna Mikić
Vjekoslav Jukić
Proofread
Joseph Molitorisz
Cover design
Igor Sloković
Cover photo
Triglav from Zgoša na Begunju, Vladimir P. Goss, August 2014
Technical support
COM DATA j.d.o.o.
URL: http://www.romanika.net/vladimir-p-goss-space-sense-and-substance
Vesion 1.0
Publishing date: 06-2016
ISBN: 978-953-7975-38-8
This work has been supported in part by the University of Rijeka
under the project number 13.04.1.1.2.02
Copyright © by the author and publisher.
Vladimir Peter Goss
Space: Sense and Substance
Rijeka, 2016
Contents
I. Introduction .......................................................................................... 1
II. Croatia’s Natural and Cultural Ecology ................................................ 16
III. Croatia’s Cultural Ecology as Witnessed through Art (primarily visual)
From Adam and Eve to Tuga and Buga ........................................... 24
From Tuga and Buga to Borna and His Father ............................... 32
From Borna and His Father to Cvijeta and Matija ........................... 65
Interlude: Nikola and Tale ............................................................... 99
From Croatia Rediviva to Croatia Rediviva ...................................... 100
Breaking the Family Crystal (Croatia Rediviva II) ............................. 105
IV. Croatian Cultural Ecology and Europe ................................................ 111
V. Conclusion ........................................................................................... 114
Bibliography ............................................................................................. 117
List of Illustrations ................................................................................... 134
About the Author ...................................................................................... 137
Space: Sense and Substance
I. Introduction
Habent suam sortem libelli.
There is an ebb and flow in the affairs of books.
Some are born under a lucky star, gestate quickly and happily to be triumphantly
born into the world of expectant readers. The fortune of the precursor of the text you
have in front of you was anything but that. Conceived in 2007 as a book on Croatia’s
cultural and natural assets, it saw one of its two initiators – the one in charge of
nature – resign from the task after three years of procrastination. The other, dealing
with culture, i.e., myself, decided to keep his end of the bargain. The publisher did,
too. Then after another year, when the text was close to completion, the publisher
went out of business. It took a year to find another as the economic crisis kept chok-
ing the publishing business. The new publisher “was enthusiastic” about my work
and for two years she did nothing. Then, when all the sources of financial support
had dried up in 2014 a “solution” was found – to publish on the net. It was done so
that the book could be downloaded for reading on a tablet, but the procedure was so
complicated and awkward that I have yet to find a brave soul who has managed to
download my book (Goss 2014). The English version, luckily, was never published,
which is good as the Croatian text was already obsolete. So after another year, I de-
cided to write, in fact, a new, enlarged and updated version in English, and here it is.
The messed up book was a summary of decades of my research into territorial orga-
nization, i.e., the mortal’s relation to the immortal space, their creative interaction,
peaceful coexistence, or tug of war. As the title says it is a book about Space, about
Nature that provides its material, immortal substance, and the creative spirit of Cul-
ture that endows it with sense. Nature and Culture together make up a Total Ecology.
Cultural ecology which is any ecology once human beings appear within it, is experi-
enced through its layers, i.e., cultural landscape. Bits and pieces of that research of
mine trickled down in a number of texts, so there is a record of my progress, but my
only serious and systematic synthesis, although published, never reached the public.
This new text aims at breaking the impasse.
The history of my involvement with spatial organization goes back to my Master’s
Thesis which was written between 1966 and 1968 at the Art History Department of
Zagreb University, but, frankly, twenty years ago I had no idea that I might be writing
these lines.
In the fall of 1964 I became a teaching assistant at the Department of Art History of
the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Zagreb to the new Assistant Pro-
fessor, Radovan Ivančević with an understanding that I would also service Professor
Stahuljak. A year later I was promoted to being a teaching assistant to the Head of
the Cathedra of Medieval Art, Professor Milan Prelog. When I got my BA in Art Histo-
1
Space: Sense and Substance
ry, in the summer of 1966, it was clear that I would do my MA under Prelog’s mentor-
ship. In the fall of the same year I went to his office to discuss the issue. Prelog did not
mince words. “You are a hiker. With your mother you have been visiting ruins and
snake pits all over Croatia. I know that your grandmother has a summer house at
Selce, so you know the Northern Coastland. In Vinodol in the Middle Ages there used
to be nine communes. I would like to know how they came into being. Say: Vinodol
territory and its spatial organization…”
Like most of my colleagues, I was a snob. I hoped I would write my thesis on “true
art.” What Prelog had to offer was not art history; why not something on the Croa-
tian Pre-Romanesque, or on Master Radovan, or Istrian frescoes? Good Lord, in that
whole damn Vinodol there was not a single shred of interlace sculpture!
I tried hard to cover up my disappointment, while Prelog continued: “O.K. Go to the
Academy’s library and see what Barada, Kostrenčić and Ms. Klaić have to say about
it. See you in two weeks.” And as I was rising from the chair in consternation, he add-
ed something which at least somewhat soothed my pain. “I have no idea what might
come out of it. But be as it may, I will stand by you. You are a smart guy. I wouldn’t
ask this of a fool.”
The question that would come out, or, more precisely, did come out, was posed at
the defense of the thesis, two years later, by distinguished Professors Duje Rendić-
Miočević (Archeology) and Branimir Bratanić (Ethnology). They said: “This is quite
nice, but it is not History of Art!” An extremely serious Prelog answered: “This is His-
tory of Art!”
At the promotion ceremony where I was represented by my late father, Professor
Vladimir Gvozdanović, Prelog lavishly praised my work saying that it should be recog-
nized as a doctoral thesis. Nothing came of it, but it did not matter, as I was already
at Cornell working on a thesis much more suitable to my intellectual arrogance –
Pre-Romanesque and Romanesque Architecture in Croatia. I forgot about my mas-
ter’s thesis, and actually hid it as the snake does its feet having considered it a waste
of time. I published a summary in Prelog’s Festschrift in 1988, and that was it (Goss
1988-89).
I believe I got to know my mentor very well. He had an “eye” with a fantastic capability
to read the form, but he knew how to do it within context. In retrospective, I have in-
herited a lot of his “contextualizing,” and I applied it to the fields I have been preoccu-
pied with most of my life – Pre-Romanesque architecture and Romanesque sculpture.
And then, in 1999, I was invited by Daniel Rukavina, the Rector of the University of
Rijeka to come to Croatia.
There is a repetitive pattern in my life. I get set up with something boring and un-
2
