This article aims to attribute a series of nine unpublished drawings held in the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest to sixteenth-century French humanist author and draughtsman Jean-Jacques Boissard. The drawings were formerly catalogued as artworks by a minor eighteenth-century German theatrical set designer, Johann Paul Caspari. The proposed new attribution is based both on stylistic and contextual analysis of Boissard’s graphical oeuvre. I argue, that the Budapest drawings that depict Antique roman funerary monuments and copy their inscriptions, were created by Boissard during the lengthy publication process of his monumental illustrated corpus of roman inscriptions and monuments, titled Antiquitates Romanae. With one exception, all of the Budapest drawings depict monuments once found in Cardinal Federico Cesi’s roman sculpture garden. Boissard spent years in rome and had access to private collections during the second half of the 1550s. later, during the 1580s Boissard made several copies of his roman sketches for safety and entertainment reasons, and presented them to his humanist friends, patrons and publishers. The Budapest series, I propose, was once also a part of a larger set of drawings by Boissard during the 1580s, and was truncated into individual sheets later.
In my study, I will first examine the accessibility of Western architectural knowledge in Hungary, based on the contemporary architectural press, then on archival and library sources. By exploring the possibilities of orientation in greater depth than before, I aim to illuminate the question of Eastern or Western orientation of the Hungarian architecture of the era, and to give a more nuanced assessment of the Hungarian building material post-1945, which is also significant in terms of numbers, and to understand its place in the universal history of architecture. The research clearly demonstrates that there was a continuous exchange and transfer of knowledge through study tours, design export and joint work with international organisations. The focus of my research was on access to the Western trade press, as journals convey the most up-to-date knowledge. The study showed that the libraries of the 15 most important design firms and architectural organisations subscribed to 368 different journals for a shorter or longer period between 1955 and 1968, and all subscribed to Architecture d’Aujourd and Baumeister. The architects made constant use of the architectural libraries, and their knowledge of Western trends was a key feature of their orientation. Using the example of László Csaba’s church in Hollóháza, I will show how Csaba was able to learn about the formal problems of contemporary church architecture in an industrial architecture design firm and provide a valid and exceptional response.
The present study deals with some phenomena of the Hungarian visual culture in the period between 1914 and 1940, a time that was fraught with contradictions and tensions. The relations of the era were characterised by a particularly strong dichotomy, which drew the attention of the authors to Reinhart Koselleck’s study The historical-political semantics of asymmetric counter-concepts. Although historical terms and contemporaneous images, or more broadly verbality and visuality, do not directly correspond, a certain number of similarities can be identified in the way the groups that shaped history functioned and in the visual products they produced. Identical socio-political evaluations of the situation, the formulation of goals and positions only occur through different media (text and images), which is why we use the term ‘counter-images’ as a paraphrase of Koselleckian counter-concepts in our study. Koselleck’s views on counter-concepts and on historical time (spaces of experience and horizon of expectation) can help us to interpret the specific rhetoric of the images presented here: the self-image and the image of the enemy articulated in them, the relations to the historical past or present and the vision of the future they contain. The cultural tradition of Central and Eastern Europe has inherited from the 19th century the duty of the artist to play a social role, the responsibility to speak out. We deal with works that embrace the particular social position from which the artist speaks. Hungarian culture has, with minor interruptions, continuously operated within the framework of repress ive regimes, and as a result the state has exercised a considerable influence on cultural processes even in the period under discussion. Therefore, a number of monumental works and propaganda products commissioned and supported by the state are analysed here. These will be counterpointed by works of various genres representing the views and interests of social groups fighting for autonomy and political representation. Some of the images discussed here can also be arranged in pairs of opposites, because the artists drew from the same source to express their extremely different positions, or used the same visual sign or motif, but with the opposite intention.
The iconographic study of blessed Helen of veszprém or Hungary presented here highlights the difficulties of the historical-artistic approach of the supposed magistra of saint Margaret of Hungary. the present work examines the visual construction of the Hungarian blessed and her earliest literary sources, the iconographic contamination caused by her disciple’s adoption of christ’s wounds and the lilies growing from them, as well as the analysis of what is believed to be the oldest surviving image of Helena of veszprém, contained in a reliquary now exhibited in the cistercian convent of Las Huelgas in burgos (spain).
The Premonstratensian monastery of Zsámbék was founded by Count Smaragd (comes or ispán), a descendant of the Aynard clan of France, which had settled in the region. The monastery was already mentioned in the Nineveh catalogue of 1234. In 1258 a land confirmation charter was issued, in which three descendants of the Aynards petitioned King Béla IV to confirm the donations made by their ancestors, Egyed and Count Smaragd. The two men had held important offices in Hungary in the years 1198–1222. The walls of the Premonstratensian church in Zsámbék have not yet been systematically studied, and the periodisation of its construction history has been based on the analysis of architectural details and forms, and on a critical examination of its style. From the wall fabric and from the art forms and sections, which often represent several stylistic layers, it seems possible to outline the church’s construction process and to further clarify it after a systematic wall and mortar analysis. As far as the main construction period of the church is concerned, based on the artistic forms, ornamentation of the capitals and plinth solutions, the church is dated to the first third of the 13th century and the first half of the following third, and the details of the works can be linked to the stylistic circles of Óbuda, Buda, Pilisszentkereszt and Ipolyság (Šahy), sometimes with looser, sometimes with tighter threads.
In the early 1480s, when it became clear that he could not expect a son from his wife, Beatrix of Aragon, King Matthias became determined to have his illegitimate son, John Corvinus, accepted as heir to the throne. The illumination of some of his luxurious manuscripts also served to propagate his dynastic plans. However, the question of the succession to the throne has not yet been considered with respect to the decoration of his missal now kept in Brussels (Royal Library of Belgium, ms. 9008), which dates to 1485–1487. In my study, by analysing the portraits of this codex and a hitherto unidentified emblem with the motto “sic fata iubent”, I show how the representation of power unfolding on the pages of the missal can also be interpreted in the context of Matthias’s dynastic plans.
In this paper I explore the psychoanalytic background of creative photography in the second public sphere of socialist Hungary. Photography theory informed by Peirce’s semiotics and psychoanalytical concepts, permeated the European and Transatlantic art discourse of the seventies, associated with Walter Benjamin’s medium theory, which was developed in the thirties. In his seminal texts on photography and technical reproduction Benjamin introduces the concept of optical unconscious, and instead of the artist’s signature he draws our attention to the porous nature of lens based media letting the uncontrollable reality seep into picturing; he appreciates the unique and magical quality not of the photographer, but her/his subject. While in the Western art scenes Benjamin’s insights were intertwined with the Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge (critique of discourses), on the other side of the Iron Curtain underground artists preferring the medium of photography stepped into the Benjaminian path by „inventing” the performative camera and re-loading the montage tradition. The protagonist of this study is Gusztáv Hámos and his photographic works from the 1970s, re-considered and further developed in the context of his photographic films made in collaboration with Katja Pratschke from the aughts. Hámos made pictures align with his systematized and conceptualized photo-process, that he combined with acute social research (collaborating with sociologists), and developed in his private sphere in a peformative way involving „rebellious” artist friends. State control contributed to the development of the interdisciplinary and intermedial approach featuring in Eastern Block. The „amateur professional” in the squeeze of prohibitions was forced to discover uncharted territories, and the bricoleur – as the psychologist Ferenc Mérei called himself – would become the inventor of private circles freedom. A significant theme of this article is the so called „montage-debate”. Montage was manifested as an interdisciplinary issue, a hub in Hungarian „broken” discourses. Thinking on montage created a space to exchange ideas between psychologists, communication theorists and artists, allowed the outlawed psychoanalysis to re-emerge thanks partly to Lacan’s semiotic understanding of Freudian terms. Research into the Hungarian tradition of photomontage shows that montage is not only a historical device of image criticism, but a creative process backed with deep-psychological awareness; i.e. psychoanalysis can be seen as a secret knowledge, a formative language that permeated the second public sphere, and the subversive use of photography.
1. Branding modern art in its entirety as “degenerate” was not the only option available to the Nazi regime, the alternative being to accept an Aryanised form of Expressionism as German art. 2. The two exhibitions held in Munich in 1937 (Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art], Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung [Great German Art Exhibition]) marked the official and total rejection of modernism by the Nazi regime in favour of conservative, naturalist kitsch. 3. The banal, radical conservative tropes against modernism – moralisation, nullification, traumatisation, irrationalisation, infantilisation, primitivisation – morphed into an ideological-political stance. 4. The analogy between Nazi art and Socialist Realism is highly exaggerated.
The Esterházy Palace in Fertőd is part of Hungary’s largest eighteenth-century residential complex. After severe damage at the end of the Second World War and in the 1950s, the palace was repeatedly renovated for almost seventy years. Between 2021 and 2022, the state apartments in the main building and some adjoining rooms underwent extensive conservation and restoration. Due to the palace’s complicated history and the inconsistent interventions of the post-war period, it was difficult to preserve as many remnants as possible. The aim was to preserve and display all historical periods from the beginning to the present, as they provide information about all the historical and cultural changes over the centuries. From this point of view, the contradictory relationship between some previous interventions and the principles laid down in documents such as the Venice Charter, the Nara Document or the UNESCO Convention of the Intangible Heritage were considered a legacy that can no longer be erased from the history of the palace. Based on conservation and restoration principles crystallised in the second half of the twentieth century and considering the changes in the field of heritage conservation since the 1990s, an attempt was made to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage as far as possible. With this in mind, the rooms were divided into three groups, each of which is subject to a different conservation and restoration method.
The Esterházy Palace in Fertőd is part of Hungary’s largest eighteenth-century residential complex. After severe damage at the end of the Second World War and in the 1950s, the palace was repeatedly renovated for almost seventy years. Between 2021 and 2022, the state apartments in the main building and some adjoining rooms underwent extensive conservation and restoration. Due to the palace’s complicated history and the inconsistent interventions of the post-war period, it was difficult to preserve as many remnants as possible. The aim was to preserve and display all historical periods from the beginning to the present, as they provide information about all the historical and cultural changes over the centuries. From this point of view, the contradictory relationship between some previous interventions and the principles laid down in documents such as the Venice Charter , the Nara Document or the UNESCO Convention of the Intangible Heritage were considered a legacy that can no longer be erased from the history of the palace. Based on conservation and restoration principles crystallised in the second half of the twentieth century and considering the changes in the field of heritage conservation since the 1990s, an attempt was made to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage as far as possible. With this in mind, the rooms were divided into three groups, each of which is subject to a different conservation and restoration method.
In the bas-de-page decoration by Jörg Breu the Elder of a leaf in the Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (fol. 78r), a cheerful winged putto is gracefully propelling a walking frame. Both the rolling structure aiding its first steps and the presence of wings cry out for an explanation, especially as the two are shown together. Unlike most other depictions of a child with a walker, this putto is neither a personification of an age of man, nor a reference to a specific infant. Among its precedents, it is worth mentioning the marginal decorations of prayers of intercession, especially the relevant depiction in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy . The structure of the walker in Maximilian’s prayer book is counterfunctional: its wooden slats together form a capital A and capital D. By modelling the walker on Dürer’s monogram, Jörg Breu was, on the one hand, thanking his mentor for his inspiration, and on the other, fulfilling the wish of Konrad Peutinger – and indirectly of the emperor – that the decoration of the prayer book be completed in the manner commenced by Dürer. While there are also classical precedents for the motif of the walker as a device aiding the acquisition of knowledge, later examples are particularly relevant to the sustentaculum modelled on Dürer’s monogram. In the seventeenth century, the metaphor of the “first step” and the concept of “giving and receiving support” frequently conjured up the theme of master and pupil; at this time, the child learning to walk with the aid of a walker was repeatedly alluded to in the context of the study and practice of art. This notion also comes across in the etching by Rembrandt known as ‘Het Rolwagentje’: here too, learning to walk independently refers to the process of mastering art, with the obligatory first steps being to practise drawing nudes and to copy the works of the master. In the depiction of the putto, its hesitant steps imply slowness, while its wings suggest speed. This ambivalence is also the essence of the adage festina lente , which was of particular relevance to Emperor Maximilian; the theme was probably suggested by Peutinger. Other references to the emperor are the figure of Hercules stepping on a snail, in the lower right margin of the same sheet, and the crane depicted on its verso.
This study examines Max Dvořák‘s previously unknown papers prepared for his one-semester lecture series at the university of Vienna in 1913. Dvořák titled these lectures “explanations of Selected Works of Art“ (Erklärung ausgewählter Kunstwerke) and in doing so developed a distinctive method within the art historical research of the so-called vienna School of Art History. The paper interprets the lectures through a close reading of the method as a parallel to the change in the concept of the work of art as it occurred in the philosophy and practice of art at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrated in the study by examples from the thinking of the German philosopher Oskar Becker and a transformation of the meaning of painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. As the study shows, such analogies allow us to understand the meaning of the work of art in Max Dvořák‘s art history in a new way.
The altarpiece of the Passion of Christ preserved in the Evangelical church in Sibiu, created in 1519 by a skilful artist, Simon Pictor, using extensively the prints of Dürer and Altdorfer, represents one of the most spectacular surviving artworks of the Renaissance in Transylvania. Its subsequent transformation in 1545 and 1701 certainly enhanced its historical significance. The restoration of the artwork in the 1980s brought back to light very significant details: the dating of the original artwork (1519), two coats of arms hinting to the patronage, and a part of the genuine style of master simon. The identification of the sinister coat of arms, thus the one in the inferior heraldic position, as belonging to Johannes Lulay (royal judge and administrator of the royal mint of Sibiu) constituted the basis of extensive incursions in the patronage of this remarkable altarpiece. However, an important question remained unsolved: who could have been the other patron or commissioner of the altarpiece? As the preeminent position of the coat of arms (on the heraldic dextra ) clearly indicates, this was an individual even higher in the hierarchy as Johannes Lulay himself. The assumption of the study is that this prominent patron was Paulus de Tomor/Tomori Pál. He remained in the Hungarian national consciousness as the heroical leader of the army in the „Mohácsi csata” of 29 August 1526, a critical turning point in the history of the state. This study contributes to the reveal of parts of his “Transylvanian biography,” his allegiances and political network in situ before he left the region, his patronal endeavours, and last, but not least, it discloses his real (and tinctured) coat of arms. At the same time, the great altarpiece of the Passion in Sibiu recovered another piece of its complex content, by the identification of the main patron (or, rather, the more honourable patron) in the person of Paulus de Tomor. Last, but not least, this study asserts that three of the characters depicted in the scene of the Lamentation over the dead Christ on the predella are in fact crypto-portraits of Johannes Lulay, his wife Clara Thabiassy, and his partner and superior Paulus Tomori.
Originating from Leipzig and active in Vienna, the printmaker and painter Donat Hübschmann (†1583) had clients from Hungary who were close to the joint Hungarian and Bohemian royal and imperial court in Vienna of the composite Habsburg Monarchy, to which the Kingdom of Hungary belonged. Miklós Oláh (Nicolaus Olahus), humanist prelate and Archbishop of Esztergom, and head of the Hungarian Court Chancellery based in Vienna, commissioned him to make a copy of his etched portrait. János Zsámboky (Johannes Sambucus), who entered court service as a humanist, ordered two works from him. In 1564–65 Zsámboky had an illustrated broadsheet made to commemorate the coronation in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) as King of Hungary of Archduke Maximilian II of Habsburg in 1563, which was decorated with a woodcut by Donat Hübschmann: a veduta of Pozsony. Further, in 1566 he assigned Donat Hübschmann to produce a copy of the earliest surviving printed map of Hungary (Lazarus secretarius, Tabula Hungariae, 1528). Other Hungarian-related works can be found among the master’s prints, such as a woodcut portrait of Hans Francolin the Younger, Hungarian Herald of Ferdinand I. It is likely that Donat Hübschmann was also responsible for the painted decoration on five letters patent, which were commissioned by Hungarian noblemen and issued by the Hungarian Court Chancellery in Vienna. In every case, the miniature coats of arms were signed with the monogram “DH”. The calligraphic decoration of these can be attributed to the noted calligrapher György (George) Bocskay and his workshop.
The practice of using classical capital lettering was introduced north of the Alps from Italy in the second half of the 15th century, and appeared very early in the Kingdom of Hungary. The article contains six case studies on the problems of architectural carvings, stone tabernacles, tombstones and the classical inscriptions on them. I. Tabernacles. All’antica tabernacles were produced in large numbers in late mediaeval Hungary and survive in churches from monumental to very small. The tabernacle frames, which followed the antique architecture of the façade, were accompanied by inscriptions: quotations about the Eucharist or, less frequently, inscriptions referring to the maker. II. Inscriptions outside the royal court. Outside the Buda residence of King Matthias, inscriptions engraved with humanist capitals also appeared, earlier than in the royal court, according to our present knowledge. The earliest dated inscriptions in Hungary survive in Veszprém and are attributed to Bishop Albert Vetési, the best known being a text written on ribbons running on a Gothic console (1467). The all’antica heraldic stones known from several places in the country are often dated, the earliest being found in the Nógrád castle of Miklós Báthory, the humanist bishop, with the date 1483. III. The royal court. Monumental all’antica inscriptions adorned the royal palace in Buda: building inscriptions, statue bases. Their texts are mostly known only from sources, as few original stone carvings have survived. These inscriptions were sometimes in bronze letters, but there were also engraved ones. The monumental inscriptions were associated with King Matthias, while the inscriptions known from the time of Vladislaus II are smaller in size and do not have bronze lettering. IV. Epitaphs. Antique letters also appeared as circular inscriptions on late medieval tombstones. The epitaph written in distychs was often engraved in a tabula ansata. Rarely, the wording was also antiquated, as exemplified by the abbreviations DOM, DOMS, DM. V. Inscriptions around Hungary in the Jagiellonian period. The commissioners of early inscriptions were familiar with the all’antica inscriptions of the Buda court. In Vienna, the first known all’antica inscriptions can be attributed to a citizen of Buda, Peter Juncker, and in Moravia to the lords of Tovačov and Moravská Třebová (Ctibor Tovačovský z Cimburka; Ladislav z Boskovic). VI. Architectural inscriptions of the Jagellonian period in Hungary. Inside the sepulchral chapel of Tamás Bakócz in Esztergom there is a bronze donation inscription (1507), in keeping with the perfect Renaissance centralised space. After 1500, all’antica building inscriptions became common in Hungary. We know of many of them, mainly in the Transdanubian region, written in pure classical capitals. In the northern part of the country, the early humanist capitals are more common; the Biblical quotations and proverbs on the staircase of the town hall of Bártfa were written in such letters. In Transylvania, classical capitals are again common: the inscriptions of the Lázói Chapel, built next to the cathedral in Gyulafehervár, or the Várday Chapel were also carved in such letters.
