Summary

The Earliest Conservator’s Accounts of the Monuments of Krosno and its Administrative District, as well as their Author Ludwik Mieczysław Lubicz Potocki (1810-1878)

The beginnings of state legal guardianship over monuments in the Austrian Empire date back to the middle of the 19th century. In 1853 the first conservation organisation was established – the Central Commission for the Study and Conservation of Monumental Buildings – which three years later appointed as national conservators Franciszek Stroński (1803-1864) for the monuments of Eastern Galicia and Paweł Popiel (1807-1892) for its Western part and the City of Kraków itself. Franciszek Stroński, who did not pursue wider conservation activities, was succeeded after his death by Ludwik Mieczysław Potocki, a landowner with a keen interest in history and its material traces. Potocki had been known in Galicia since 1851 for his generous donation to Kraków’s public collections of the statue of Zbruch Idol (Sviatovid, Worldseeker), found in the Zbruch River, and his appointment soon proved to be an extremely appropriate move. In the following years, the newly appointed conservator developed a very wide range of activities, inviting both the local government of Eastern Galicia and the clergy of all denominations, as well as landowners interested in the artistic past of the Republic of Poland. Following the recommendations of the Viennese Central Commission, Potocki undertook first conservation works on monuments in Galicia, partly financed from the national budget, and also initiated pioneering inventory works on monuments of the artistic past of these lands. The earliest conservation reports on the monuments of Krosno and its environs, prepared by Mieczysław Potocki on the basis of his field trips, are connected with this activity. He published some of his reports in German in the journal of the Central Commission, others in Polish in the publications of the Ossolineum in Lviv, while some were preserved in manuscript and have only been published in print in this book.

An extremely interesting source for learning about the activities of Mieczysław Potocki is his Conservator’s Journal, meticulously kept between 1866 and 1878, constituting a recording of all of the conservator’s official correspondence. The short notes in this Journal, referring to conservators’ correspondence sent and received, give an idea of Potocki’s admirable activity in the field of the protection, inventory and restoration of architectural monuments, paintings and sculptures, as well as the care of archival collections, including the archives of great value of the so-called Bernardine Archive in Lviv.

This book brings together all of Potocki’s preserved texts relating to the monuments of Krosno and the region, dating between 1865 and 1878. Source accounts from the nineteenth century are accompanied by extensive contemporary commentaries in the footnotes. Due to the fact that knowledge of the life and work of Ludwik Mieczysław Potocki is today full of blanks, reflections on the basis of his historicist texts have been supplemented by an extensive chapter devoted to the biography of this outstanding conservator, reconstructed using all the information found in the course of an extensive search for sources. All this was done in order to show this fascinating but forgotten man in the right light, as a meritorious pioneer of historic building conservation in Poland.

Translated by Joanna Ziobro-Strzępek