New Insights into Ancient Objects from the Collections of Vojtěch Lanna Jr.

A lecture by Mgr. Daria Murzina, prepared on the occasion of the 190th anniversary of the birth of Vojtěch Lanna Jr., will present new research results dedicated to a comprehensive catalogue of ancient objects from his former collection.

Lanna, an entrepreneur and collector of the second half of the 19th century, assembled an extensive collection of ancient art, which was dispersed at the beginning of the 20th century through auctions — including through Rudolph Lepke's Kunst-Auctions-Haus — and today is found in museum and private collections across Europe and America. The lecture will show how this lost collection can be re-examined through a catalogue linking auction records, museum inventories, archival sources, and visual documentation. Using selected examples from ceramics, sculpture, glass, glyptics, numismatics, and jewelry, the presentation will demonstrate the methodology for working with fragmentarily preserved material and the possibilities of interdisciplinary connections between art history, archaeology, and museology. The lecture will also raise the question of a comprehensive catalogue as a tool for preserving and interpreting dispersed historical collections in contemporary museum practice.

Mgr. Daria Murzina is an art historian and doctoral candidate in the field of Christian art history at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University. She specializes in ancient art, the history of collecting, and provenance issues with particular emphasis on the reconstruction of dispersed historical collections. Her dissertation — Ancient Objects from the Collections of Vojtěch Lanna Jr.: Reconstruction and Analysis of a Dispersed Collection with Focus on Ceramics, Sculpture, and Glass — develops an interdisciplinary approach combining art history, archaeology, museology, and digital humanities.