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The art collection of István Marczibányi (1752–1810), remembered as the benefactor of the Hungarian nation, who devoted a great part of his fortune to religious, educational, scientific and social goals, is generally known as a collection of ‘national Antiquities’ of Hungary. This opinion was already widespread in Hungarian publicity at the beginning of the 19th century, when Marczibányi pledged that he would enrich the collection of the prospective Hungarian national Museum with his artworks. But the description of his collection in Pál Wallaszky’s book Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria published in 1808 testifies to the diversity and international character of the collection. In the Marczibányi “treasury”, divided into fourteen units, in addition to a rich cabinet for coins and medals there were mosaics, sculptures, drinking vessels, filigree-adorned goldsmiths’ works, weapons, Chinese art objects, gemstones and objects carved from them (buttons, cameos, caskets and vases), diverse marble monuments and copper engravings. Picking, for example, the set of sculptures, we find ancient Egyptian, Greek and Ro man pieces as well as mediaeval and modern masterpieces arranged by materials.

After the collector’s death, his younger brother Imre Marczibányi (1755–1826) and his nephews Márton (1784–1834), János (1786–1830), and Antal (1793–1872) jointly inherited the collection housed in a palace in dísz tér (Parade Square) in Buda. In 1811, acting on the promise of the deceased, the family donated a selection of artworks to the national Museum: 276 cut gems, 9 Roman and Byzantine imperial gold coins, 35 silver coins and more than fifty antiquities and rarities including 17th and 18th-century goldsmiths’ works, Chinese soap-stone statuettes, ivory carvings, weapons and a South Italian red-figure vase, too. However, this donation did not remain intact as one entity. With the emergence of various specialized museums in the last third of the 19th century, a lot of artworks had been transferred to the new institutions, where the original provenance fell mostly into oblivion.

In the research more than a third of the artworks now in the Hungarian national Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest could be identified, relying on the first printed catalogue of the Hungarian national Museum (1825) titled Cimeliotheca Musei Nationalis Hungarici, and the handwritten acquisition registers. The entries have revealed that fictitious provenances were attached to several items, since the alleged or real association with prominent historical figures played an important role in the acquisition strategies of private collectors and museums alike at the time. For example, an ivory carving interpreted in the Cimeliotheca as the reliquary of St Margaret of Hungary could be identified with an object in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 18843), whose stylistic analogies and parallels invalidate the legendary origin: the bone plates subsequently assembled as a front of a casket were presumably made in a Venetian workshop at the end of the 14th century.

There are merely sporadic data about the network of István Marczibányi’s connections as a collector, and about the history of his former collection remaining in the possession of his heirs. It is known that collector Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846) purchased painted and carved marble portraits around 1816 from the Marczi bányi collection, together with goldsmiths’ works including a coconut cup newly identified in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 19041). The group of exquisite Italian Cinquecento bronze statuettes published by art historian Géza Entz (1913–1993), was last owned as a whole by Antal Marczibányi (nephew of István) who died in 1872. These collection of small bronzes could have also been collected by István Marczibányi, then it got scattered through inheritance, and certain pieces of it landed in north American and European museums as of the second third of the 20th century. Although according to Entz’s hypothesis the small bronzes were purchased by István’s brother Imre through the mediation of sculptor and art collector István Ferenczy (1792–1956) studying in Rome, there is no written data to verify it. By contrast, it is known that the posthumous estate of István Marczibányi included a large but not detailed collection of classical Roman statues in 1811, which the heirs did not donate to the national Museum. It may be presumed that some of the renaissance small bronzes of mythological themes following classical prototypes were believed to be classical antiquities at the beginning of the 19th century. Further research will hopefully reveal more information about the circumstances of their acquisition.

Abstract

The paper is concerned with a 17th century relic of French baroque painting meagerly represented in Hungarian private collections. The author has had a chance lately to directly examine the work known to Hungarian special researchers since 1966 as a work by a Spanish or French painter. As a result of the examination, the painter, the portrayed person and the client who ordered the picture could be identified. As the decoding of the that-time inscription on the back reveals, it was painted in 1676 by Carlo (Charles) Palme, an offspring of a dynasty of Lucchese painters born in Aix-en-Provence. The owner of both the painting and the portrayed person was an aristocratic lady in Aix-en-Provence, Madame de Venel born Madeleine de Gaillard de Longjumeau (1620–1688), who became known as the governess of Cardinal Mazarin's nieces Les Mazarinettes (the Mancini girls) as well as of the children of Louis XIV and the future king of Spain Philip V of the Bourbon house. The lady and her husband, Gaspard de Venel were among Mazarin's supporters. They served in the court of the queen mother Anne of Austria, then of Maria Theresa of Spain and her husband the Sun King. The full-length portrait of Raimond, the violinist with dwarfism set in a Provencale landscape is a rare artistic document of the centuries-old custom of keeping little people for entertainment at the French court, too. The wife of Louis XIV is known to have kept several dwarfs around her. The childless Madame de Venel, her lady-in-waiting had Raimond, and her husband also had a dwarf whose portrait is said by the sources to have also been painted, this time by another well-known Provencale painter Laurent Fauchier before 1672. This – now latent – painting had been kept tabs on in the collection of Madame de Venel's heirs (de Gaillard-Longjumeau line) until 1770 (in the inventory taken on 20 September 1770 it is designated: Tableaux: No. 3. Le nain de Monsieur de Venel). The Budapest painting helps clarify the relation between 17th century Provencale portraiture and the social role little people with dwarfism played in 17th century French society. The professional collaboration and the family relations of the two painter families of Aix, the Palmes and the Fauchiers, as well as their relationship with their patrons the Venel family can be discerned. But the career of another dwarf of Provence, Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), nicknamed “Le Nain de Julie”, “Le Nain de la Princesse”, a once celebrated poet, one of the founders of the French Academy, later bishop of Grasse and then Vence, proves that an achondroplasiatic body stature did not necessarily hinder social success. The Venel family who kept two dwarfs and had them portrayed by local masters chose a motto for the picturesque decoration of their residence in Aix from the love poetry of the dwarf poet: “Allez amours, à tire d'aile”. The up-to-date elaboration of the Aix portrait painter Carlo Palme is still a task to be done, but the portrait of Raimond, the dwarf of Madame de Venel dated 1676 now in Hungary can be ranged among the early pieces in his oeuvre.

Summary

A progress report on a research dealing with the attribution and localisation of a curious painting. The iconography, the motifs and the composition show many links with the pictorial tradition of the subject-matter in the Netherlandish art of the 15th-16th centuries. But the support is not the usual oak panel used there and the style is not to be linked with any known hand. The painting might have been painted by an emigrant or wandering Flemish painter either in France or in Spain, but it can not be localised exactly. It is an remarkable example of the radiation of Flemish painting and style in the mid-16th century.

A cikk a budapesti Szépművészeti Múzeum apuliai vázái közül azokkal foglalkozik, amelyek néhányalakos jelenetein a dionysikus, illetve az Aphroditéhez vagy Persephonéhoz köthető motívumok keverten fordulnak elő. A gyakran több szinten is jelentéssel bíró szimbólumok egyaránt kötődnek funeráris és házassági rituálékhoz, valamint az orphikus misztériumokhoz.

Az ókorkutatás legfontosabb feladatai közé tartozik, hogy korunk aktuális problémáinak megoldásához adjon segítséget. Az egyik ezek közül az akkulturációé, vagyis annak a vizsgálata, hogyan viselkednek az egymással érintkező, különböző hagyományokra épülő kultúrák e találkozás során. Egy másik az a kérdés, mit nyújthat a kortárs művészet megértéséhez az antik művészetek hagyatékának tanulmányozása, és ennek másik oldala: miben segítheti a modern művészet jelenségeinek ismerete az antik művészetek egyes vonásainak jobb megértését. A tanulmány a Szépművészeti Múzeum egy eddig közöletlen Kr. e. 700 körül készült etruszk vázájának formáját és díszítését elemezve kísérel meg legalább részlegesen választ adni a két kérdésre, és ennek során egy Veiiben dolgozó vázafestőnek műveiből kirajzolódó portréját próbálja meg felvázolni.

Abstract

Sive Marten Swarcz seu Martinus Niger alias Marcin Czarny, master of Veit Stoss's Cracow high altar – this is the subtitle of Miklós Mojzer's major two-part study published in 2006 and 2008 in which he identified Master MS and traced the roots of his work to Veit Stoss's Nuremberg and Cracow workshops. He mentioned in passing that at the very same time, in the 1480s, another winged altarpiece was being made in another important town of Frankonia, Rothenburg on the frame of which the following inscription can be read: Frater Martinus Schwartz die Sancte Marie Magdalene complevit. The altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin was once in the monastery of the Dominican nuns in Rothenburg and is now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Martin Schwarz was the guardian of the Franciscan monastery in Rothenburg from 1485 where he had his workshop fitted out. He was the local leader of the order until 1506.

Recent researches have proven that some statues carved by Tilman Riemenschneider were painted by Martin Schwarz. The starting point for indentification was the identity of the Pressbrokat on the St John figure of the Wiblingen altarpiece and on the clothes of the Virgin figure of the inscribed altarpiece. The same pattern can be found on the fragment of the attire of the Madonna preserved in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts since 1923. Before the museum, the statue was in an altar shrine (now lost). The history of the altarpiece can be retraced with certainty to the village church of Schweinsdorf outside Rothenburg, but tradition associates it with the neighbouring imperial town.

Among the rich documentation on the furnishing of the Jakobskirche mention is made of an altar of the Virgin erected in 1495/96, which was carved by a sculptor of Würzburg – obviously Riemenschneider. The question arises whether the statue painted by Martin Schwarz and datable to the end of the 15th century according to the chronology of the Riemenschneider Madonnas belonged to this altar.

Antal Hekler (1882-1940) was one of the central figures of Hungarian classical archaeology and art historiography in the first half of the 20th century. He began his career at the Hungarian National Museum and continued at the Museum of Fine Arts (where he laid the foundation for the Antique Collection), he organized the short-lived Hungarian Scientific Institute in Constantinople (1916-1918) and from 1918 until his death he headed the Art History Department at the Pázmány Péter University. The work of his pupils determined 20th century Hungarian art historiography.

The presented letters shed light on the start of Hekler’s career. After graduation in law, he changed professions. Upon his personal encounter with the art of classical antiquity he began studying classical archaeology; he was encouraged to do so by his family and friends, too. He enrolled at the university of Munich where he became one of Adolf Furtwängler’s favourite students. He obtained his doctoral degree under his supervision in 1907. During his studies he pursued correspondence with his patron in Budapest, József Hampel (curator of the Old Collection in the National Museum), informing him of the academic life in Munich, his researches, travels, forming scholarly contacts all over Europe. In Munich, then Paris, London, Italy he met the leading researchers, curators of leading museums. He did not only publish his research finding in German at that time, but the Archaeologiai Értesítő in Budapest edited by Hampel also carried writings by him. Back home Hampel took him on in the National Museum. (He participated in the excavations in Dunapentele [the ancient Intercisa] where he also wrote letters.) In addition to letters addressed to Hampel, some others written in Munich add information about the beginnings of Hekler’s career.

Abstract

It is well known that the core stock of the collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts comprises works purchased by Károly Pulszky. Our knowledge of the director's purchases abroad is based on documents, invoices and letters kept in the Archives of the museum. A great part of these were published in the catalogue of the Pulszky Károly in memoriam exhibition (editor László Mravik, 1988). It revealed that the majority of works standing for the Italian school were bought from or through the good offices of Florentine art dealers between 1893 and 1895. The Pulszky family lived in Florence between 1860 and 1864. During that time the father Ferenc Pulszky visited the galleries of the best known art dealers such as Marco Guastalla and Alessandro Foresi. From the next decade, young Károly also appeared on the art market of Florence as a customer. In these years the sales and transfer of art works abroad were supervised by the regional office of the Rome-based Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione headed by the director of the Regia Reale Gallerie e Musei di Firenze. Ufficio Esportazione still active today was only established in 1909, but earlier export cases can also be researched in its archives. The export permits for art works to be shipped to Hungary in 1893–95 clearly reveal that Károly Pulszky also transported the works he had bought from local art dealers with the permission of this office.

The present paper highlights the export permits related to Pulszky's purchases of murals in Florence. The documents reveal that a somewhat larger number of frescoes came to the museum from Florentine art dealers than thought earlier, and our knowledge of the Italian fresco collection of the museum could be extended with some new information. It can also be specified whom Károly Pulszky bought works from, to whom he regularly returned in Florence. He had three permanent suppliers: Emilio Costantini, Achille Glisenti and Luigi Resimini. He made occasional purchases from another three dealers, Elia Volpi, Domenico Caligo and Sabatina Forti.