LELJA DOBRONIC

Lelja Dobronić Her distinction and eminence matched only by her selflessness and altruism, historian and art historian Lelja Dobronić (1920-2006) is one of the few people who can be credited with rebuilding old Zagreb through in-depth, well-researched history. This uncompromising scientist came from a stimulating creative background: her father Antun Dobronić was a composer, her mother a musician, her sister Rajka Dobronić a harpist, and her husband Pavao Vuk-Pavlović a philosopher. In addition to science and art, Lelja Dobronić was passionate about nature and loved mountains, fresh air, difficult climbs, and the joy of scaling mountaintops and taking in distant horizons, as if her inner and outer world existed in an interchange of metaphors. Lelja Dobronić graduated from the Classical Languages Secondary School in Zagreb in 1939 and earned her degree in Art and Culture History with Classical Archaeology and National and World History from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1943. In 1946, she earned a PhD in the history of wrought iron art in Northern Croatia. She worked as the curator of the City Museum of Gypsum Casts (Gipsoteka) and as the research associate of the Museum of the City of Zagreb, the Regional Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, the Museum Documentation Centre, the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, and the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography. For thirteen years, until her retirement in 1980, she served as the director of the Croatian History Museum. Lelja Dobronić taught at postgraduate courses in Zadar and was the founder and editor of the magazine Vijesti muzealaca i konzervatora Hrvatske [Bulletin of Museum Professionals and Conservators of Croatia]. She invested boundless energy in the study of Zagreb’s history in the field and in archives, in particular the city’s architecture, urbanism and lifestyle. She also studied the city periphery, summer residences, gardens and parks in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the historical topography of bishops’ and Kaptol’s estates and the history of religious orders such as the Knights Templar, the Order of St. John, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and the Order of St. Augustine. Lelja Dobronić published the first overview and report on Croatian museums. Her enormous bibliography includes more than five hundred scientific papers, forty books she authored and more than two hundred lexicographer entries. She received a number of distinguished awards for her work, including the Award of the City of Zagreb and the Pavao Ritter Vitezović Lifetime Achievement Award. With the clarity and beauty of her discourse and her riveting choice of topics, Lelja Dobronić rendered top-level science into love for Zagreb and Croatia. Her works, such as Zagrebački Gornji grad nekad i danas [Zagreb’s Upper Town in the Past and the Present], Biskupski i kaptolski Zagreb [Bishops’ and Kaptol’s Zagreb], Zagrebačka biskupska tvrđa [Zagreb Bishops’ Fort], Zaboravljeni zagrebački graditelji [The Forgotten Builders of Zagreb], Graditelji i izgradnja Zagreba u doba historijskih stilova [The Builders and the Development of Zagreb at the Time of Historical Styles], and many others, are not just mandatory reference works, but also a valuable source of information about the sentiments of Zagreb residents about their city. The amount of archival materials she studied and published is far too great to fit into one lifetime, unless it is Lelja Dobronić’s lifetime. Academician Željka Čorak