There is a type in the iconography of Saint Stephen which, although it is perhaps one of the best known portrayals of the saint, has nevertheless escaped the attention of art historical research. The woodcut in the Augsburg edition of János Thuróczy's Chronica Hungarorum (1488) is of interest not only from the viewpoint of art history; it is at least as important for the history of ideas and constitutional law, and it was not only in one particular period, namely at the very end of the 15th century that it became a special theme, but it proved to be very much alive in the following century with minor changes. The Hungarian source of the composition is a special theme that appeared in the 14th century, the portrayal of Saint Ladislas crowned by angels which was revived by the art propaganda for display of Louis I (the Great), based on Byzantine traditions and given current relevance. As far as we know at present, the motif of angelic coronation first appeared in the iconography of Saint Stephen on a woodcut printed perhaps in Ulm around 1460-1470. However, the immediate model for the woodcuts in the Thuróczy chronicle was very probably not this image of Saint Stephen but the relief of King Matthias Corvinus on the tower of the Ortenburg castle in Bautzen. Right from the time of its appearance the woodcut was an enormous success. This was due in part to its technique and message but the main reason why it became popular was its extremely important constitutional law implications for the feudal constitution, especially in the struggles for succession following the death of Matthias Corvinus (1490). Since it gave the most succinct expression of the doctrine of the Holy Crown, the constitutional law foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary, and could be updated later too, countless copies and variants were produced in the following centuries, particularly after the appearance in Nuremberg in 1664 of the Mausoleum published at the expense of Ferenc Nádasdy chief justice, right up to the 20th century. It was probably through this art channel that it trickled down later through further intermediary stations into folk tradition although there are only a few oral and pictorial traces of this.

The period lasting from the Compromise betweeen Austria and Hungary in 1867 to World War I was a ‘golden age’ of Hungarian horticulture and garden art. Country houses with their parks belonged traditionally to the way of living of the aristocracy. The ‘construction boom’ generated by a fruitful interplay of the favourable economic conditions of the ‘Gründerzeit’ and the related social needs and financial abilities, resulted in a multitude of new gardens. This surge of development almost coincided with the spread of historical revivalism in garden design from the 1860s and with an increasing role played by Hungarian creators of gardens in addition to foreign specialists who settled or were invited to work here.

The period between the two World Wars did not effect a fatal break in this garden culture. In some cases, this slowly consolidating period brought real efflorescence (e.g. Hatvan, Röjtökmuzsaj, Szeleste), though these places were the exceptions. The construction and transformation of parks together with the modernization of houses continued in the interwar decades (e.g. Dég, Röjtökmuzsaj) and considerable new establishments were also created (e.g. Vajta, Csorvás, Selyp).

The country house gardens of historical revivalism, with their spectacular parterres, avenues, exotic plant rarities grown in the greenhouses or nursery gardens and transferred to the pleasure-grounds or shown at exhibitions, with their sports facilities and family mausoleums represented the prestige of the aristocracy which still clearly played the leading role in politics and society despite their declining economic and cultural influence. Alternatively they expressed the ambition of a new plutocracy to acquire social legitimation for their wealth. In a few cases and in both groups, there was something else: the garden became the site and instrument through which they could achieve accomplishment by means of creative activity.

The present study is a first attempt at summarising the partial results of research that in its initial phase on the topic. It describes 12 sites in detail, 9 from the period between 1880 and World War I, and 3 from the 1920–30s. After the descripions it gives a preliminary overview of tendences and characteristics of the examined period including the transformation of the landscape garden, revivalist structural elements, follies and utilitarian garden structures, statuary and other garden ornaments, landscape gardeners and creative owners, mainteneance and productive gardening, with a lot of further examples and personalities. Finally, a brief outlook closes the study to the post-1945 survival of the gardens described and historical revivalism in garden art in general.

In the past 35 years or so, scores of theories, some bordering on legend, have emerged about the origin of the earliest known authentic representation of the Holy Crown of Hungary. Systematic historical and art historical research, however, has reconstructed convincingly the circumstances of its creation. Contrary to the majority of assumptions proposed until now, it can now be safely declared that the earliest representation of the Hungarian crown jewel has nothing to do with the – actually fictitious – possession of the crown by the Fugger family in the mid-15^th century. The handwritten work namely, in which the image survived, is not a Fuggerchronik of Munich but the history of the Habsburg dynasty (Ehrenspiegel des Hauses Österreich) written for the family of the great merchant banker, Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1575) by the self-taught town historian, genealogist and heraldist Clemens Jäger from Augsburg (c. 1500–1561).

The two-tome manuscript of nearly 800 folios with thousands of coats of arms and hundreds of illuminations is preserved in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. The earliest known depiction of the crown was made replicas of which were unknown until recently but were identified by the authors in three richly illuminated handwritten copies of the Ehrenspiegel. All were made in Innsbruck as the outcome of the court art and art patronage of the archdukes Ferdinand and Maximilian of Tyrol in the late 16^th and early 17^th century. By dating the manuscripts kept today in Munich, Vienna and Dresden more accurately and analysing the crown depictions in them, the – until recently – controversial chronology of the Ehrenspiegel copies could be clarified reassuringly. A revised version commissioned by Emperor Leopold I was completed by 1668 and was also released in print by the Endter press in Nuremberg with “updated” text by the German poet Sigmund von Birken. This version also included the image of the Hungarian crown, but the publisher replaced the 16^th century depiction with a more up-to-date one. It adopted the crown representation on the title-page of Mausoleum (printed in Nuremberg 1664), a series of Hungarian ruler portraits completed a little earlier upon commission from a Hungarian aristocrat and art patron, Chief Justice of Hungary (1655–1671), Count Ferenc Nádasdy. It must be attributed to the publisher’s demand for authenticity that added to the crown from the Mausoleum, which in basic forms emulated the crown image illustrating the famous tract of guardian of the crown Péter Révay published in Augsburg 1613 (De Sacrae Coronae regni Hungariae ortu... Commentarius) and reformulated several times later, he also enclosed the title-page of the politics historical work by Martin Schödel (Respublica et status Regni Hungariae, Leiden 1634) for the purpose of providing more accurate material details.

A German handwritten petition by Clemens Jäger, the author of the Habsburg family history, for a coat of arms and crown representation has been recovered in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. In it he was inquiring about the Holy Crown with reference to the work (Rerum Ungaricarum decades) of the Italian historiographer of Matthias Corvinus, the noted humanist Antonio Bonfini. This source permits us to declare: the earliest authentic representation of the Hungarian crown was made in Augsburg between April 1553 (the terminus post quem for the sending of the petition from Augsburg to Vienna) and November 1561 (the death of Jäger). Confuting earlier presumptions we can contend that instead of some mid-15^th or early 16^th century model, Jäger used a wholly contemporary reproduction. It showed the crown kept in the Habsburg court in Vienna from the beginning of September 1551 depicted – if we are not mistaken – by the copperplate engraver and draughtsman of antiquities (Antiquitetabconterfetter) Hans Sebald Lautensack served in Vienna from August 1554, who was in close contact with the famous Vienna court historiographer who also knew Jäger, Wolfgang Lazius. Lautensack also engraved a portrait of Lazius in 1554. Some data suggest that our safe dating (1553–1561) can be reduced to the interval between the late summer of 1554 and 1556, between the beginning of Lautensack’s service in Vienna and the publication of the historian Lazius’s great map of Hungary (1556), the latter adorned with a Holy Crown with pendants. To conclude, the earliest detailed and authentic representation of the Hungarian crown was the outcome of the collaboration of Central European historiographers, first of all historians of Augsburg and Vienna, genealogists, heraldists and engravers, without the involvement of Hungarians, as far as we know. Not that this fact would reduce in any way its outstanding significance or peculiar value.

Abstract

General Jean-François L'Huillier had a baroque country house built in Edelény in Borsod county between 1716 and 1728, on an estate he had received from the emperor for his military services. The wall paintings of the rooms as seen today are associated with the third generation of owners: contracts with several painters survive from the time of Countess Ludmilla Forgách, the granddaughter of the founder, and her husband István Eszterházy of Zólyom. The characteristic style and rococo motifs of the figural murals brought other works into connection with the Edelény paintings, those at Taktabáj and Lelesz (Leles) also preserving the name of Ferenc Lieb, a Viennese painter who can be demonstrated between 1758 and 1788 at Igló (Spišská Nová Ves); he was most likely the painter of the six rooms ordered by the countess in 1769. The decorative painting by János Voronieski, who was contracted four years earlier, perished. Later, in 1780, Lieb's son-inlaw Jakab Ignác Fabricius, a painter of Miskolc, adorned the walls of a seventh room in the western wing.

In the meantime the count employed portraitist Sámuel Horváth in Pest in 1768 to create a historical series of 225 pieces: the models for the small full-length representations of Hungarian chieftains, kings and ancestors of the Esterházy family were the Nádasdy Mausoleum (1664) and the Esterházy Tropheum, family histories of engravings (1700) — a copy of the latter also included in the Edelény library. The prototype of the gallery of ancestors at Fraknó (Burg Forchtenstein) might have been known to the count, but in his Zólyom (Zvolen) castle there was also a similar series made after the Mausoleum: panels of a wooden ceiling from the first quarter of the 18th century. The Edelény paintings were arranged like a frieze in the upstairs great hall, until then only embellished by stucco work from the time of the construction and by stone carvings with the Forgách arms on the fireplace.

The double enfilade upstairs in the eastern wing of the mansion — the sources claim — constituted the private sphere of the couple. In the first room the personifications of the four seasons in costumes appear in genre scenes of agricultural work, accompanied by putti symbolizing the four elements. The walls of the new dining room are adorned with idyllic scenes from the life of the mansion including the itinerary motif of the maiden on the swing, with Venus on a swan-drawn cart opposite her. The four battle-scenes imitating framed paintings allude to the heroic deeds of the ancestors. In the next room the walls of which are painted with wallpaper pattern the ceiling is dominated by Hermes and Amor, while the count's bedroom ceiling is devoted to Jupiter. Here in the door and window reveals a selection of emblems refers to the virtues of the husband, while in the vault sections contemporaneous portrait-like figures — two couples — are shown in fashionable costumes, in the company of Gypsy musicians. In the room of the countess next to the oratory the allegory of good government eulogizes Ludmilla Forgách; the cosmological symbols and personifications of the four parts of the world are depicted on the ceiling of the adjacent cabinet.

While the count wished to emphasize the dynastic roots and imperial position of his family and conserved the earlier tradition of the gallery of ancestors, the wife adopted the recent European fashion of profane rococo wall paintings. However, István Eszterházy applied in vain to the empress for the chief administrator's post in the county on several occasions, nor did he receive the St Stephen order. The couple had no children of their own. In 1775 Ludmilla Forgách became a Dame of the Star Cross order; she was extolled for the support of orphans, but at the same time a mocking poem was also written of her supercilious way of life. It is a fact that she left Edelény burdened with debt to her son from her first marriage. The pictorial program completed with the — now lost — gallery of ancestors roots in the baroque tradition of representing the “connubium” of two families which may be fed by rivalry and mutual support alike. The surviving rococo wall paintings represent a singular, genrelike attempt at this iconography.

Summary

The present paper must be interpreted as a sequel of the work “Daten zu Leben und Werk des Pariser Architekten Charles Moreau zwischen 1760 und 1803”published in the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, Heft 4, 2001. This essay was finished when Moreau came to Vienna in the company of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy at the end of 1803. The prince engaged the architect in Paris to lead the future works for the renewal of the family residence at Eisenstadt forming part of Hungary at this time. Moreau was quatered in the “Rothen Haus”which was situated in the Viennese suburb Alsergrund. In 1794 Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy became owner of the big family estates in the kingdom of Hungary. Shortly after his installation he engaged the French architect Jean-François Thomas de Thomon. He was responsible for the redesign of the garden of Nikolaus II in the Viennese suburb Landstraße, which was finished already in 1795. Surprisingly Thomas de Thomon quit his contract at the beginning of 1798 and went to Russia where he became architect of the tsar. Only at the end of 1802 Prince Esterházy employed another architect trained in Paris and Rome, Maximilian von Verschaffelt. Verschaffelt can be associated with the redesign of the garden in Eisenstadt and the alteration of the orangery still under construction. The other activities of Verschaffelt are not at hand. It seems that he was dismissed by the prince in favor of Charles Moreau in 1804. There is a good reason to believe that from 1804 on the activities followed to the directives of Charles Moreau because the first buildings invented and drawn by the architect were realized also at this time. In July 1804 the prince ordered the construction of the Marientempel which was situated north-west of Eisenstadt at the hillside of the Leithagebirge. At the same time the prince decreed the project for the Marientempel, he instructed the building department to start the works for the Maschinenhaus which was the first building designed by Charles Moreau for the landscape-garden. Among others it had to bare the steam-engine bought by the prince in London in 1803. Besides the mentioned activities the redesign of the old castle of Eisenstadt was started. According to the proposals of Charles Moreau the Prince ordered the beginning of the works in March 1805. First of all a passage under the north-wing and the basement for a representative portico flanked by two big ramps leading into the colonnade had to be constructed. Nikolaus II also started a project in Vienna in 1805. The work began in May 1805 and was not finished until 1807. Besides the works for Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy another client asked Moreau to design a palace in the city of Vienna. Elzbieta Anna Teofila Princess Lubomirska wanted to redesign several houses at the Mölkerbastei which defined an inner court. In the middle of 1806 Charles Moreau had to go back to Paris. He had been employed since the beginning of 1801 as “Architecte de la Sorbonne”. There is a good reason to believe that during his sojourn in Paris he visited not only his relatives but also his teachers, friends and old colleques. Virtually all of them were near Jacques-Louis David, the former teacher of Charles Moreau: Dominique Vivant Denon, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard and Antoine-Jean Gros, Charles-Paul Landon rival of Moreau and winner of the Grand prix de peinture as well as, among others, Jean-Baptiste Isabey who became a close collaborator of the architect during the Congress of Vienna. Although Nikolaus II was confronted with a proposal for the alteration and rearrangement of the so-called “Sauerbrunn”near Pöttsching – a new bath was mentioned for this place in 1805 – he decided to invest into the enlargement of a similar building already existing in Großhöflein. But at the beginning of 1807 there must have been some change of opinion and Charles Moreau was ordered to design a new bath not far from the old one. Another work of Moreau is located in Laxenburg where the Prince was responsible for the royal post-office and all its arrangements. It seems that the old station was too small. Therefore Nikolaus II ordered to enlarge the building by putting on a new flat and stables in 1805. He was also working on the new landscape gardens of the prince. When the garden of Pottendorf was nearly finished new hothouses were planned and built from the end of 1807. It was also in 1807 when the Prince possibly animated by the new constructions at Pottendorf ordered to construct new hothouses at Eisenstadt. A virtually new challenge was the design for a big festival-hall in the Viennese suburb, Schottenfeld, for which the Englishman Sigmond Wolfson made available his house and garden. The works for the building which consisted of several large rooms with different decorations was started in April 1807 and already finished in December of the same year. During the past years Charles Moreau and his family settled down in Vienna. In 1807 the painter Karl Johann Hummel charged him to design a new bath in the Viennese suburb Leopoldstadt. Moreau accepted and on Januray 1, 1808, they bought a big site near the Donaukanal. The idea to integrate the residences of both families into the complex must have been born at this time. Beside his activities in the service of Prince Esterházy, mainly in Eisenstadt, he was also commissioned to do other works. In 1811 Count Nikolaus Eszterházy gave a charge to the princely architect to redesign three houses situated between Walfischgasse and Krugerstraße in Vienna. The second work of Charles Moreau for the Count Esterházy was the design for a mausoleum for the deceased members of the family. Nagyganna was selected for it because of its geographical qualities. Also Count Johann Pálffy gave a contract to Charles Moreau. The count acquainted two houses in the Wallnerstraße in Vienna which were desolate from a fire-hazard. Moreau was ordered to redesign both buildings into a palace. The works done by Moreau in Austria and Hungary gave a lot of sympathy to the architect. The honoration was going so far that the council of the Akademie der vereinigten bildenden Künste in Vienna elected him as regular counsellor in 1812. Since Emperor Franz I did not confirm the decision there must have been some problems caused by the fact that Charles Moreau was no regular member of the institution at this time. So he became member of the academy in February 1812 and three months later he was nominated again for counsellor. But first on January 15, 1813, the emperor signed the letter of appointment.