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Although it has always been thought that the French King Louis XIV was the first to wear something resembling a cravat, or a scarf as its predecessor, on a portrait dating from the end of the 17th century, it is now clear that the oldest portrait of someone wearing a cravat was painted in a Croatian city. This was of course Dubrovnik. That is to say, it was recently discovered that the famous Dubrovnik poet, Ivan Dživo Gundulič, on a portrait dating from 1622 and kept in the Rector’s Palace, is wearing a scarf around his neck, tied like a cravat. This insight gives a new emphasis to the character of the great man of Dubrovnik, Gundulić, but the new facts also shed light once more on the origins of the cravat.
This all means in fact that the cravat was worn in Dubrovnik as long as 55 years before it was worn in France, and there is real evidence to support this fact. Although this portrait of Gundulić has been on show in the Rector’s Palace for many years, it is interesting that it has never been noticed before now that the poet is not wearing a normal scarf, but precisely a cravat. “Dubrovnik is one of the greatest Croatian brands, just like the cravat, and with this discovery these two brands now complement one another even more” it was pointed out, amongst other things, at the press conference in the atrium of the Dubrovnik Sponza Palace, on the occasion of this discovery, by Mirta Hansal, a public relations officer from “Academia Cravatica”. Moreover, Dubrovnik and the cravat are each in their own way a symbol of the centuries long story of freedom.
