Marble Statue of St John the Baptist from the Church of St John the Baptist on the Island of Sipan

This paper focuses on a marble statue of St John the Baptist from the church dedicated to the same saint in the area of Silovo Selo on the island of Sipan. Although it is an excellent Renaissance sculptural achievement found in the Dubrovnik region, it has only been mentioned incidentally in scholarly literature. The statue stands out both for the expensive material from which it was carved and for the fact that a segment of Romanesque figurative relief has been preserved in the back. In the front of the marble block, a traditional prophetic image of St John the Baptist in the desert is carved in high relief. The half-length standing figure of the saint is adapted to the format of the stone block and placed inside the shallow lunette on the main portal of the Sipan church. It is an exceptionally high-quality sculptural work that exceeds the average level of Dubrovnik sculpture in the High Renaissance with its accentuated realism and exquisiteness. But although St John the Baptist of Sipan stands out from the overall sculptural achievements of the time in the Dubrovnik area both for its quality and for the material used, some analogies have been perceived with the depiction of the ascetic saint in the lunette on the south portal of the monastery church of St Francis in Dubrovnik, carved by brothers Leonard and Petar Petrovic in 1499. Based on a detailed analysis, it has been argued here that the statue of St John the Baptist shows a higher degree of idealism with regard to the related works by the Petrovic brothers and that it was produced somewhat later, most likely in the first half of the 16th century, when the spacious Renaissance church was built for which the statue was intended. In the back of the Renaissance statue of St John the Baptist, there is a partially preserved Romanesque relief with the image of an eagle. Apparently, the marble fragment originally belonged to a large-scale relief composition featuring an eagle fighting a snake. As to its stylistic and morphological features, as well as the quality of craftsmanship, the Sipan eagle shows a resemblance to a group of Dubrovnik reliefs with zoomorphic depictions showing the victory of good over evil, which presumably originated from the Cathedral and were made in the first half of the 13th century. Special attention has been paid to the reuse of marble and the deliberate preservation of older sculptural work as a kind of sign of antiquity, which has been detected in several other examples in Dubrovnik and its surroundings.