This article aims to attribute a series of nine unpublished drawings held in the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest to sixteenth-century French humanist author and draughtsman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).
