Learning from Pula: istarske starine i europska arhitektonska kultura/Istrian antiquities and European Architectural Culture

The construction of the narrative of the city of Pula as a city of ancient monuments experienced its key moment in the 15th and 16th centuries, when three still perfectly preserved buildings, an amphitheater, the Arch of Sergius and the Temple of Augustus, and one that has not survived to modern times, the Great Theater on Zaro hill, entered the corpus of monuments on the basis of which the modern European classical language of architecture was formed. The city in the collective memory becomes a flickering reflection of ancient glory, and the ruins a model that artists from Naples and Venice to Scotland and Goa in India are trying to surpass. Knowledge of Pula's antiquities of circulated through drawings and printing, their meaning oscillated, thus forming an important part of the architectural culture not only of European architects but also of educated social strata, clients and antiquaries from the 15th to 18th centuries. With the decline of interest in ancient monuments in terms of canonical models in the late 18th century, Pula antiquities lost the aura of a model that legitimized certain extremely popular motifs, such as double pillars framing the arch, and became provincial antiquity. The shift in valorization reflects a shift from the center to the very edge of architectural culture, into the realm of the historical and the liminal. Only significant restorations of these monuments reinsert them to the sphere of architectural discussions, but in terms of architectural heritage. Therefore, Pula's antiquities are a paradigmatic example for exploring various forces and shifts in the field of architectural culture over a long period of time