Burato Tomaso

Tomaso Burato (Dubrovnik, 27 March 1840–Zadar, 17 January 1910) was a professional photographer whose long career in Dubrovnik and Zadar occupies a central position in the history of nineteenth-century photography in Dalmatia. Contemporary records indicate that he had devoted himself to photography by about 1860, initially while completing the preparatory education and practical training required for pharmaceutical work in Dubrovnik. During the mid-1860s he pursued pharmaceutical studies at the University of Padua and continued to practise photography. The precise outcome of his university education remains uncertain: administrative documents attest his studies and his successful completion of at least the first year, as well as a subsequent application to practise pharmacy, yet his name is absent from a later published register of Dalmatian students and graduates at Padua. Claims that he received a formal degree in chemistry and pharmacy should therefore be treated with caution. Surviving cartes de visite bearing a Paduan imprint nevertheless demonstrate, or at least strongly suggest, photographic activity associated with his residence there. ([gkzd.hr](https://gkzd.hr/zadaretro/fotografija/tomaso-burato))

By the later 1860s Burato was operating as a photographer in Dubrovnik, producing portraits in the commercially successful carte-de-visite format and establishing a reputation beyond the city. In August 1873 the press announced his projected departure for Buenos Aires; instead, later that year he settled in Zadar, the administrative capital of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, where the comparatively small number of established practitioners offered favourable conditions for a substantial photographic business. His atelier stood at Campo Castello, now Trg tri bunara, near the church of Our Lady of Health. It remained active for nearly four decades and served successive generations of Zadar’s inhabitants and families from the surrounding region. Portraiture formed the commercial foundation of the enterprise, ranging from cartes de visite and cabinet photographs to enlargements and more elaborate studio compositions. Burato also photographed urban views, landscapes, ecclesiastical interiors, architectural monuments, works of art, manuscripts, civic ceremonies and public events, thereby combining the functions of portraitist, topographical recorder, reproductive photographer and occasional visual reporter. ([hbl.lzmk.hr](https://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak/burato-tomaso?utm_source=openai))

Burato’s most consequential contribution to the history of the photographic book lies in three albums devoted to Zadar, dated 1875, 1886 and 1894 and generally regarded as among the earliest Croatian photographic monographs. The first was prepared in connection with Emperor Franz Joseph I’s visit to Zadar in 1875 and assembled views of the city and its principal monuments, including the cathedral of St Anastasia, the churches of St Simeon and St Francis, the Land Gate, the Five Wells Square, the medieval Bablja Tower and a broad urban panorama. The mounted photographs were accompanied by printed descriptive matter, transforming the album from a commemorative presentation object into an ordered visual survey of the city. The album of 1886, dedicated to Archbishop Pietro D. Maupas on the thirtieth anniversary of his episcopate, concentrated upon Zadar’s ecclesiastical monuments and sacred heritage. A considerably larger album dated 1894 extended this documentary programme to the city’s artistic and historical patrimony, including architectural views, liturgical objects, medieval remains and works preserved in ecclesiastical treasuries. These volumes are important not merely as collections of individual photographs but as deliberately organized books in which image sequence, printed text and material presentation articulated a civic and historical identity. ([hbl.lzmk.hr](https://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak/burato-tomaso?utm_source=openai))

His professional standing was confirmed through sustained participation in international and regional exhibitions. Burato received an honourable mention at the agricultural, industrial and artistic exhibition in Trieste in 1871 for photographic views and carte-de-visite portraits; a medal for merit at the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873; a silver medal at Skradin in 1875; and an honorary diploma at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878. Further distinctions followed in Paris, Vienna and Trieste. In 1876 the Imperial Office in Vienna authorized him to use the title of imperial and royal court photographer, an appointment prominently displayed in his atelier’s imprints and publicity. In 1878 he was admitted to the Parisian Académie nationale agricole, manufacturière et commerciale; he was also associated with the Società Fotografica Italiana and participated in the wider professional culture of European photography. His presence at the photographic congress held in Florence in 1899 is documented by a group portrait in which he appears among such practitioners and technical specialists as Vittorio Alinari, Giuseppe Pizzighelli and Filippo Torrigiani, although this common participation should not by itself be construed as evidence of closer personal relationships. ([tehnika.lzmk.hr](https://tehnika.lzmk.hr/burato-tomaso/?utm_source=openai))

Burato was also closely involved with the technological and commercial expansion of the photographic image into print. In 1884 he established the First Institute for Photomechanical Printing in Dalmatia, intended to produce durable impressions in printing ink by contemporary photomechanical methods. This enterprise placed his atelier at the intersection of photography, graphic reproduction and publishing, extending its work beyond the unique or small-edition photographic print. By the end of 1894 he was printing and issuing picture postcards from his own photographs, including single views and composite designs of Zadar. The postcards translated motifs previously developed in his albums and topographical photographs into inexpensive objects of correspondence and circulation. They consequently broadened the audience for his urban imagery and participated in the late nineteenth-century construction of Zadar’s reproducible visual identity. In 1908 Burato received the Gold Cross with the Crown, one of the final official distinctions of his career. ([ojs.srce.hr](https://ojs.srce.hr/arhivski_vjesnik/article/download/17753/9639/63164?utm_source=openai))

After Burato’s death in 1910, the atelier was continued briefly by his widow, Giannina, and subsequently by their daughter Vicenza, under whose direction it remained active until 1922. The survival of Burato’s oeuvre is nevertheless fragmentary. A very large body of glass negatives, reported to have numbered nearly ten thousand, was destroyed during the bombing of Zadar in 1943–44. Extant photographs, albums and postcards are now dispersed among the State Archive in Zadar, the Archaeological Museum, the National Museum Zadar, the Scientific Library of the University of Zadar, conservation collections and private holdings; substantial groups also survive in Dubrovnik. These objects retain documentary value for the architectural and social history of Dalmatia, but they also permit the reconstruction of Burato’s changing studio practice, formats, imprints and publishing activities. Scholarly reassessment began principally with Nada Grčević’s research into early photography in Zadar and was consolidated by the monographic work and retrospective exhibition undertaken by Abdulah Seferović and Antun Travirka in 1990–91. That scholarship established Burato not simply as a prolific provincial portraitist but as a photographer-publisher whose albums, photomechanical work and postcards linked the atelier culture of the 1860s with the increasingly reproducible and internationally connected photographic culture of the fin de siècle. ([ivan.zkzd.hr](https://ivan.zkzd.hr/hr/izbor-fotografija-tomasa-burata-iz-fototeke-znanstvene-knjiznice-sveucilista-u-zadru/378.html))