Exhibits from the Count’s collection, all 150 of them, had been restored by specialists of the National Restoration Science Research Center of Ukraine and its branch in Lviv, The Day was told by the Drohobych Museum of Local History employee Oksana Solovka. The exhibition includes artworks of the 17th to 19th century from the fields of graphics, porcelain manufacture, weapons-making and weaving.
Restorer Levko Skop told us that Karol Lanckoronski (1848-1933) was a scion of an ancient Polish noble house known since 1370. Historians say the family name comes from Lanckorona, the ancestral village’s name.
Count Lanckoronski was a hereditary member of the House of Lords in the Austrian Imperial Council, Vice President of the Society for Cultural Protection in Galicia, Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of Malta, and a great landowner in Eastern Galicia with the estates of Rozdil, Komarno, and Yahilnytsia, in the Kingdom of Poland with the estate of Wodzislaw near Jedrzejowa, and in Styria with his estate of Frauenwald.
The Count was a lawyer by education, but an art historian by vocation, and an unrivalled connoisseur of Italian Renaissance at that. He traveled almost the whole of Europe, visited the African continent, and journeyed across Japan and India in his lifetime. He took an active part in preserving cultural landmarks in Austria and Poland, and managed to gather a huge collection of artworks that was thought to be the third in the number of items in the entire Austria-Hungary. He kept his treasures in the purpose-built palace in Vienna and in his summer residence in Rozdil, the latter currently is a village in Mykolaiv district of Lviv region. “This splendid collection of world-class masterpieces is now divided among several museums,” Solovka says. “The Drohobych Museum hosts a part of it.” Let us recall that residents and guests of Kyiv could see the Count Lanckoronski’s treasures in late 2011. The exhibition, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Drohobych Museum founding, was hosted by the National Taras Shevchenko Museum.
Graphics, porcelain, weapons and textiles from the collection of a scion of the ancient Polish noble house will remain on show in the Drohobych Museum in 38 Shevchenko St. till the end of February.
