Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (1(37).2012/2013)

Maria Skubiszewska (31 March 1930 - 13 April 2011)

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Maria got to know all the important European museums and galleries that own important
collections of Italian art, and she was able to study also some of their storage holdings, including
the Hermitage. She conducted research at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome, Kunsthistorisches
Institut in Florence and Kunstbibliothek in Berlin. She worked together with many art histo-
rians, consulting them on attributions. They included Roseline Bacou, curator of drawings at
the Louvre; Rodolfo Pallucchini, in those years the greatest authority on Venetian painting;
Francesco Santi, director of the Galleria Nazionale delfUmbria in Perugia; Federico Zeri, an
eminent expert on Italian painting; Yuri Kuznetsov, curator of painting and drawing at the
State Hermitage Museum and Michel Laclotte, curator of painting at the Louvre and later its
director. Ties of friendship linked her to some of these scholars, including Bacou, Pallucchini
and Laclotte. Laclotte wrote about Maria in his memoirs with great warmth and deep respect.10
Maria Skubiszewska’s serious professionalism and great knowledge of Italian painting
also produced dozens of scholarly articles and the book Malarstwo Italii w latach 1250-1400
[Italy’s painting in 1250-1400].11 Her most remarkable writings include an article about two
valuable paintings by Franciabigio in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw,12 in
which she argues for a new attribution and which became accepted in world literature. Her
book remains an indispensable university textbook, with an exceptionally clear and gripping
narrative about the beginnings of Italian painting, its development, its main achievements
in Giotto’s studio and in the work of the artists working in Siena, all the way until its decline
following the Black Death of 1348. But it is also fascinating reading for every amateur of early
Italian painting. Skubiszewska’s deep analysis of large numbers of artistic works and cur-
rents sketched out against a historical, social and economic background, reflects her ability,
characteristic of all her scholarship, to combine her extensive knowledge of the subject with
logical reasoning and a perfectly disciplined formulation. It would be a dream to see a second
edition of this book, with modern graphic design and new colour illustrations!
At the National Museum in Warsaw in 1967-1973, Maria also served as the managing edi-
tor of the Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie, at the time Poland’s only foreign-language
publication about the history of art. It had been founded in i960 by Jan Białostocki, who was
its editor until his death in 1988.
Maria and her husband spent 1981-1989 in France. After returning to Poland and to the
National Museum in Warsaw, she served for four years as the curator of the Department of
Foreign Painting. In this period of Poland’s political transformation, she was in charge of
resolving difficult questions of ownership of the works deposited before the Second World
War by numerous aristocratic families. She also oversaw her staff’s creation of a guide to the
museum’s collection.13

Lanckorońskas Donation, Kazimierz Kuczman, Jerzy T. Petrus, Maria Podlodowska-Reklewska, eds (Krakow: Zamek
Królewski na Wawelu, 1998), pp. 23-7. Kazimierz Kuczman, who had served as the exhibition’s curator, also wrote
in this catalogue about Italian painting.
10 Michel Laclotte, Histoires de musées. Souvenir d’un conservateur (Paris: Editions Scala, 2003), pp. 193-4.
11 Maria Skubiszewska, Malarstwo Italii w latach 1250-14.00 [Italy’s painting in 1250-1400] (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, Auriga Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1980). Malarstwo Europejskie w Średniowieczu,
vol. 4.
12 Skubiszewska, “Franciabigio’s two tondi with Annunciation,” Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie,
n°3,XVI (1975), pp. 84-96.
13 National Museum in Warsaw. Guide. Galleries and Study Collections, Dorota Folga-Januszewska,
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, eds (Warsaw: National Museum in Warsaw, 2006).