In 1975 the National Museum in Labin opened the
permanent memorial exhibition of Matija Vlačić
Ilirik (Matthias Flacius Illyricus) to mark the
400th anniversary of his death. Although Vlačić
wrote ...more than three hundred various works,
we can only tentatively call him a literary author.
He was primarily a theologian, a philosopher, a
philologist and historiographer, in short a humanist
with the broadest possible interests. The
Labin Municipality and the Ministry of Culture
insisted on a memorial collection for this great
Þ gure in European thought in Labin. The Museum
complied with an interesting museum exhibit
without any of Vlačić’s original works. The task
was accomplished by relying on the concept put
forward by Matko Ronjić, then the director of the
National and University Library, with additional
work done by his associate Šime Jurić; crucial
was the effort on the part of the Museum staff and,
in particular, the ingenuity and inspiration of the
visual treatment by Eugen Kokot, the artist and
restoration expert from Labin, now a professor at
the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb. This created
an exhibition that even today, three decades after
opening, has not lost any of its impressive nature,
its fresh and creative interpretation.
