Dubrovnik Cathedral

Brief information

The present Dubrovnik Cathedral does not simply stand on an old church site: beneath it, churches succeeded one another, and the 12th-century Romanesque church disappeared after the earthquake of 1667. For that reason, the building’s Baroque appearance reads as a response to catastrophe, not as a calm remodeling for the sake of fashion.

The design of the new cathedral was entrusted to Andrea Bufalini, but construction stretched over 30 years, and Tommaso Napoli noticeably altered the original plan. This matters when looking at the building: what the visitor sees is not a single gesture by one author, but a cathedral assembled after destruction by several masters. Later, it was damaged again during the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991 and restored.

What to notice first

It makes sense to look at the cathedral as a Baroque structure in which plan and decoration work together. The three naves establish the longitudinal division of the interior, the three apses gather the space at the eastern end, and the large dome makes the center of the building the main accent. These elements help explain how the new cathedral acquired a clear, solemn form after the loss of the earlier Romanesque church.

Inside, the main altar with Titian’s polyptych from around 1552 is especially important: an earlier work found itself in a building constructed only after the earthquake. Alongside the architecture of reconstruction appears an object that survived another era. The treasury continues this line: more than 200 artifacts of religious art show the cathedral not only as a shell for worship, but also as a place where objects are kept that connect it with earlier church history.