The Lviv

Lviv

Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

 National Museum is one of Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

's largest museums, dedicated to Ukrainian culture in all its manifestations. It was established by Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky

Andrey Sheptytsky

Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from 1901 until his death. During his tenure, he led the Church through two world wars and seven political regimes: Austrian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Soviet, German National Socialist , and...

 in 1905 and was originally known as the Lwow Ecclesiastical Museum. It currently bears Sheptytsky's name.

History

The founder donated some 10,000 items to the museum and raised the funds required for its maintenance. An extravagant Neo-Baroque villa was acquired to house the collections.

After the Second World War, the museum was renamed the Lviv Museum of Ukrainian Art. The collection was augmented by adding a number of exhibits confiscated from other Lviv museums. By the late 20th century, the museum's holdings of Ukrainian icon

Icon

An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...

s and folk art

Folk art

Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic....

 were the largest in the country.

The National Museum has recently moved into the ornate building of the former Polish Industrial Museum. A cluster of memorial houses and the Sokalshchina Museum in Chervonohrad

Chervonohrad

Chervonohrad is a city located in the Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. The city is designated as a separate raion within the oblast. It about 62 km north of Lviv and 7 km from Sokal. The population numbers 68,300 inhabitants....

 are affiliated with the National Museum.

Collection

Icon-paintings of which there are at least 4000 of form an important part of the collection as does folk sacral sculpture. A set of Ukrainian folk and professional engravings dating back to the 17th and 18th century's are of great value to the museum from a Ukrainian cultural viewpoint and there are over 1000 in this department . The museum has paintings by artists such as Johann Georg Pinsel, Maciej Polejowski, Michał Filewicz and others.

The National Museum of Lviv also has a number of important manuscripts, some of them very rare such as Cracow publications by Schweipolt Fiol

Schweipolt Fiol

Schweipolt Fiol from Neustadt an der Aisch in Franconia was a German-born 15th century pioneer of printing in Eastern Europe....

 (1491-1493), Prague and Vienna printings by Francysk Skaryna, and virtually all of Ivan Fedorov's publications.