WITOLD DOBROWOLSKI (1939–2019)

Abstract

The recollections of Prof. W. Dobrowolski focus mainly on his activity at the National Museum in Warsaw (1960–2011) and his scholarly accomplishments. The creator of modern Etruscology in Poland in the 1960s, he contributed greatly to promoting knowledge of Etruscan civilization among Polish society. He won his international fame with the documentation of Etruscan tombs and their painterly decoration in the modern period. Furthermore, W. Dobrowolski was an unquestioned expert in Greek pottery, particularly from the Vilnius and Gołuchów collections kept at the National Museum in Warsaw, and was capable of applying his deepened iconographic analyses to museum displays. His passion being Greek art as a universal and topical model for artistic and esthetical values, he was greatly committed to promoting ancient art in Poland as an organizer of several dozen exhibitions at local museums, author of numerous encyclopaedic entries and chapters in art history textbooks. Moreover, he authored and curated some big and important exhibitions at the National Museum in Warsaw, where he also had a significant impact on the permanent Ancient Art Gallery which existed until 2011. Dobrowolski’s studies in Polish collecting of ancient historical pieces in the 18th and 19th centuries paved him the way to important analyses of the presence of the Antiquity in European and Polish culture that were the academic focus in the last period of his life.