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Arts and Humanities
After the abolition in 1782 several works of art owned by the Clarisses were lost. Some of them were identified in recent years; I would like to write about an other one that was found in the cloister of the Order of the Sisters of Saint Elisabeth in Bratislava. It is fairly unique because of its theme: it commemorates the escaping of the Clarisses from Stephen Bocskai’s attack on Graz and Vienna in 1605, also the taking over of the reformed and stricted Regula. It was painted together with another, recently hidden picture that has since been lost almost twenty years later in 1623, most likely in the Austrian capital, when Clarisses escaped secondly to Vienna.
In this paper I analyse the photomontages of Endre Bálint (1914–1986) in the context of the cultural politics of the Iron Curtain period in Eastern Europe and Hungary. First, the study takes a diachronic, historical approach to photomontage as a creative method that maintained continuity between the avant-garde generations of artists, a way of thinking and a creative process accordingly, cultivated in the circles of persecuted, banned or silenced artists experimenting during the decades from the 1920s to 1970s. Second, by placing Endre Bálint’s late photomontages (made after his 1963 return from his “exodus” to Paris) in the context of contemporary artistic phenomena (e.g. Brecht’s photobook, Jean-Luc Godard’s work, David Hockney’s montages or bricoleur punk artists), I argue that, in contrast to the generally held view, they are not the withering signs of renunciation, but rather a way out of renunciation, that is, a solution. “We breathe in fragments,” Bálint wrote, and the pictorial form to fittingly reflect a fragmented way of existence (together with the psychological burdens, shadows of the past, and the social and cultural-political determinations) was the montage-technique that had flourished from the 1920s, and whose Eastern European, distinctively Hungarian variant found its guardian, its good shepherd in Bálint, in his creative practice. Bálint’s late photomontages also deserve attention from the point of view of a silent narrative of art history, which does not focus on middle-aged artists’ major works, but on the profuse production by the old masters, the masters of sprezzatura, which is characterised by an aesthetic lightness, a kind of aesthetic liberation and swiftness, and the ability to allow memories a free influx into the creative work. One of the conclusions of this study is that Hungarian photomontage, and especially the late work of Endre Bálint, can be instructively read in conjunction with the equally restrained psychoanalytic literature of the period, in which the splitting of Self as a traumatic consequence of shocking events and also a means to survive those events is a key concept. A critically productive artistic construction that is based on fragments can be seen and read as the visual counterpart of a psychological notion of Self-splitting.
Style and Inscription
Inscriptions in classical and early humanist capital letters cut in stone in Hungary in the age of King Matthias and the Jagiellos
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.
Három évtizeddel azután, hogy Karl Krumbacher megszervezte a Müncheni Egyetemen az első bizantinológiai intézetet, a tudományos eredmények bemutatására nemzetközi bizantinológiai kongresszust hívtak össze. A kezdetben politikai okokból szűk körre korlátozódó rendezvény fokozatosan megnyílt minden nemzet számára, miközben a bizantinológiai kutatásban az egyes országok saját törekvései mellett egyre nagyobb szerepet kaptak a nemzetközi együttműködések és a tudományos eszme cserék. A magyar kutatók aktívan részt vettek ezekben a folyamatokban, és magas szintű tudományos munkájuk mellett kulturális-diplomáciai erőfeszítéseikkel is igyekeztek Magyarországot integrálni a globális tudományos diskurzusba. Törekvéseiknek köszönhetően Budapest elnyerte a bizantinológia legrangosabb nemzetközi kongresszusának rendezési jogát, de a kényszerítő külső körülmények miatt a rendezvény végül nem kerülhetett megrendezésre. A tanulmány az eredeti terveket és koncepcionális kereteket követi nyomon a korabeli dokumentumokon keresztül.
A XI–XII. századi, ismeretlen szerzőtől származó Timarión című szatíra főhőse egy utazás során tetszhalott állapotba kerül, két démon erőszakkal az alvilágba kényszeríti, ahol egy bírósági tárgyaláson bebizonyítja, hogy még nem halt meg, úgyhogy visszatérhet az élők közé. Jelen tanulmány célja, hogy bemutassa és értelmezze Kónstantinos Akropolités kétszáz évvel később keletkezett rövid levelét, melyben a szerző éles kritika tárgyává teszi a Timariónt, anélkül hogy kifogásait pontosan kifejtené.
A Ceres istennőhöz kapcsolódó egyik legfontosabb átmeneti rítus a mundus megnyitása. A mundus olyan objektum Rómában, aminek megnyitása különleges alkalmakkor tartott állami rituálé volt. Amíg a mundus nyitva volt, a holtak szellemei járták keresztül a világot, így minden akkor folytatott tevékenységet rossz előjelek fenyegettek. Sok vita övezi a mundus kérdéskörét, mert nem ismerjük a megjelenésének formáját, pontos elhelyezkedését, és a szokás eredetét is homály fedi. Tanulmányunkban arra keressük a választ, hogyan kapcsolódott Ceres mint agráristenség az élet és a halál kettősségéhez, miért kapcsolják alakjához a mundust, és ez miként jelenik meg a római szerzők munkáiban. Kitérünk arra is, hogy a mundus Cereris hogyan jöhetett létre Róma alapításakor, mi volt a célja, és mit jelenthetett a korabeli rómaiaknak.
Abstract
This paper argues that the indefinite, definite, and kind interpretations belonging to nouns and noun phrases are independent universal semantic features realized by different linguistic means across and within languages. The investigations presented here take the viewpoint of the speaker: first the semantic content of the three features is characterized, then the linguistic expressions these interpretations belong to and arise from are examined. Cross-linguistic data support the conclusions that none of these features is derived from the other(s), their primary source is the intrasentential context, and they express “instructions” to the hearer to find more or less identifiable or more or less representative referents that pertain to the denotation of the noun (phrase).
Narrowing or in Kálmán's writings
Investigating the usage of vagy ‘or’ in Hungarian
Abstract
The paper investigates the usage of the Hungarian connective vagy ‘or’. Our starting point is Ariel & Mauri's (2018, 2019) and Ariel's (2020) papers about the use of or, where they argue that its core meaning is ‘alternativity’. Our goal is to describe Hungarian vagy ‘or’ by analyzing various corpus data, and compare the results. We examined the personal subcorpus of the Hungarian National Corpus (MNSZ2), and the Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Database (BEA). In this paper, as a tribute to the memory of László Kálmán, we investigated a third corpus that is constructed from Kálmán's very popular informative texts on Qubit.
Ethnicity and Representation
Material Folk Art at the Intersection of Local Identity, Minority Policy Goals, and Ethnographers' Aspirations in the 1970s and 1980s in Hungary
Abstract
Those Germans who remained in Hungary after the Second World War faced complex political, economic, and social difficulties. In cultural terms, the diverse self-definitions of the Germans living in Hungary at that time precluded national cohesion, despite the use by the authorities of the unifying definition “German.” This national minority was bound together primarily by shared trauma. Individuals and communities alike were searching for their place amidst the changed circumstances, and it was the umbrella organization known as the Democratic Association of Germans in Hungary (Magyarországi Németek Demokratikus Szövetsége) that sought to bring them together. It was not until the 1970s that the association began to professionalize its activities and to conduct ethnographic research in cooperation with qualified specialists. During this process, the village of Harta, which was already famous for its folk art, came to their attention. It was specifically the economic potential of this settlement in Bács-Kiskun County, and its character as an ethnic and confessional enclave, that laid the foundations for the uniform objects and motifs of this local center of furniture painting. After the Second World War, the county administration's cultural policy was relatively accepting of the furniture-making tradition here, and the local intelligentsia showed a supportive attitude towards the settlement's German heritage. In the 1970s, there was still a furniture painter living in Harta, who won the most prestigious folk-art award, regularly participated in exhibitions and gala events, and even produced painted furniture in the cooperative's subsidiary branch at the initiative of the local council president. This ensured that painted furniture from Harta came to represent not only the traditionalist aspirations of the German Association, but also national cultural policy. Harta furniture emerged as the most iconic style of minority painted furniture and as the shared heritage of the German community in Hungary.
