Marko Marulić in Zadar Periodicals, in the Year 1846

Continuing his research into the manifold impact of Marulić on Croatian literary history, the author now concentrates on the Romantic response to the art and personality of the great poet, which started with an article on Marulić in the Danica ilirska, the central organ of the Croatian national revival (see: Colloquia Maruliana II). In 1846 two extensive articles on Marulić appeared in the Zadar papers of Zora dalmatinska and La Dalmazia. The author of the article published in the Zora Dalmatinska and entitled Život Marka Marulića vlastelina splitskog (The Life of Marko Marulić, a nobleman from Split) was the paper editor Ante Kuzmanić, who took at face value the story about the alleged intemperance of Marulić’s young years recorded in a book by G. A. Constantini (A. Santi Pupieni) of 1744. It is interesting that Luka Svilović (1802-1877), in the Zadar weekly La Dalmazia, under the title of Marco Marulo, offers the revision of the mentioned leg-end, negating the authenticity of Constantini’s story. Unlike the dilettante Kuzmanić, Svilović, with this first literary polemics concerning Marulić, wins credit as a special-ist in literary matters (the contemporary public knew him also as a distinguished translator of Italian plays and poetry). Svilović first brings the text by Constantini, in which he finds »gravi contradizioni coi fatti«. Follows his own Italian translation of the Latin biography of Marulić by Franjo Božičević Natalis. Svilović points to the fact that Božičević was a contemporary of Marulić and a man-of-letters and, contrasting the two texts, convincingly confutes Constantini’s fabrications. Both articles influenced the later literary opinions on Marulić. As a consequence, Franjo Carrara, Šime Ljubić, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Petar Kasandrić took over some of the data and phrasings used in the aforesaid articles