"Starobylý" původ lidového ornamentu (podle Vlasty Havelkové)

Vlasta Havelková collected Moravian folk embroidery and interpreted folk ornaments from the 1880's onwards. Typical of her articles were uncompromising attempts to demonstrate ethnic authenticity and Slavic origins for patterns on Moravian embroideries and dyed Easter eggs, as well as for folk writings. She remained oblivious to the influence of other cultures and to the professional art that had permeated the folk environment in material shape, for example sample books. She derived her views from analogies with the motifs on prehistoric artefacts from Central Europe, the Czech lands, Germany and Austria, which she attributed to "the Slavs". Only after her theories had elicited challenging and negative responses did she begin to consider, towards the end of the 19th century, the fact that the basic ornamental elements featured in parallel in several other cultures, without being adopted by one another. In the spirit of the mythology school, she also tried to read magical meanings into individual motifs derived from Slavic iconology. Vlasta Havelková's almost exclusive focus on folk embroidery and ornament ended in the first decade of the 20th century, when she became a custodian of the Ethnographic Museum, Prague. From 1906 onwards her occupation kept her busy with museum matters and substantially confined her publishing activities to a couple of articles and a compendium on folk costumes in Czechoslovakia. Her romantically naive theories of Moravian folk ornament, often verging on the fantastic, survive not only as illustration of the author's obsolete standpoints, but also as testament of the moods and yearnings of the Czech nation at the time.