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Abstract

The series of copper engravings representing Hungarian noblemen (Icones illustrium heroum Hungariae), which was prepared by Elias Wideman, appeared in 1652 at Vienna as the last piece of a three-part series containing a hundred portraits each. This unit of a hundred portraits, which offered a cross-sectional view of 17th-century Hungarian noble society, exerted a strong influence upon the further development of the portrait in Hungary. The three volumes were sponsored by field marshall count Johann Christoph Puchheim, whose decision probably underlay the fact that whereas the first two volumes (Vienna, 1646 and 1649) published, with only 18 exceptions, the portraits of Austrian or imperial aristocrats, the third one contained exclusively those of noblemen from the territories subjected to the Crown of Saint Stephen. This latter, “Hungarian” volume differed from the two previous ones not only with regard to the persons portraited, but also in that the full-page family coat-of-arms of Puchheim gave place to the copper engraved picture of the Hungarian Crown there.

The Wideman literature has so far regarded the volume's representation of the Crown as the exact copy of the copper engraving which was prepared by Wolfgang Kilian in 1613 at Augsburgban for the book of Péter Révay on the Holy Crown. Yet a thorough examination of the two engravings has yielded a different result: it is not a copy which was published in the volume of Wideman in 1652 but the Kilian engraving itself pressed from the original plate. The reuse of the copper plate has hitherto escaped the attention basically for two reasons. Firstly, the representation of the Crown at Wideman is already closer to reality, reproducing correctly the number of its hangers; secondly, the engraving which appeared in 1652 is not signed. The two things are probably related: it may have been a consequence of the alteration made in the representation of the Crown that the name of Révay, the inventor, and that of Kilian, the engraver, were removed in the course of the reworking. Yet the identity of the copper plate is still proved by the visible remnants of the removed details on the Crown's representation in the Wideman volume.

Consequently, the question emerges of how and where was the copper plate, prepared by Wolfgang Kilian at Augsburg forty years before, found, and by whom and why was it transferred to Wideman to Vienna to be published in the Icones? The plate, which returned to the author, Péter Révay in 1613, was consequently inherited by his grandson, judge royal Ferenc Nádasdy, who cared for the intellectual heritage of his grandfather. When the goods of the judge royal, who was tried and executed for high treason in 1671, were listed at Pottendorf, two plates representing the Hungarian Crown were inventoried, one of them with the abbreviated name of Augsburg attached. This was probably the plate prepared by Kilian in 1613, whereas the other apparently the one made for the Crown' representation in the second edition of the book which was published at the expenses of Nádasdy in 1652.

All that could so far be found out on the relationship between Ferenc Nádasdy and the portrait series published by Wideman is that the Hungarian-related representations of the two volumes (1646, 1652) were at least partially engraved by Wideman on the basis of the portrait gallery of Nádasdy which represented his contemporaries. Yet the reuse of the original Kilian plate, which can be proved to have been owned by Nádasdy, raises the further possibility that the hitherto unknown initiator and intellectual director of the third, exclusively Hungarian volume may have been (perhaps together with others) Ferenc Nádasdy himself, a hypothesis that is underpinned by the recently reconstructed relationship between Nádasdy and Puchheim. It was probably Nádasdy who ordered Wideman to modify the copper plate borrowed for the volume, and to alter the engraving of the Crown according to exact information. The source of the correction of the representation may have been Nádasdy himself, who participated to the coronation of Ferdinand IV as Master of the Hungarian Royal Court in 1647, and was thus offered the possibility of a thorough examination of the otherwise invisible Crown and could consequently give a detailed description of it to Wideman.

It was not by pure chance that the volume containing the portraits of 100 Hungarians was headed by the engraving from the book of Révay on the Holy Crown, for the latter's conceptofthecrownfocussed precisely upon the idea of the “nation of estates”. The same concept was expressed by the iconography of Wideman's Icones by collecting the representatives of the nation of estates behind Révay's representation of the Crown. The volume of portraits can thus be regarded as an example of the intensification of the national identity of the estates in the 17th century.

The work of Wideman which was published in 1652 influenced the consequent development of portrait painting in the 17th century in several regards. Painted noble portrait galleries were made in series by the adoption of the so-called Wideman type, and later even a demand emerged to supplement the painted versions with the portraits of further persons. The two most renowned series of small-scale oil paintings (one of them with 136 portraits) belonged to the Csáky family, and were in all probability prepared in the last quarter of the 17th century upon the order of judge royal István Csáky, renowned for his literary activities.

The importance and initial influence of the Wideman engravings mainly manifested itself in the transformation which took place in the iconography of the Hungarian noble portraits. The change of identity which resulted in the disappearance from the middle of the 17th century of Western European wear from the Hungarian female portraits, and in the representation of aristocratic women in Hungarian costume, is to be accounted for by the appearance of the Icones and the emergence of a united “nation of estates”. The reason was surely not a change of fashion, but the intention of representing themselves on the portraits as members of the Hungarian noble society, which, as a phenomenon, is most conspicuous in the representations of the female members of families loyal to the Habsburg court. The exclusiveness of Hungarian wear on the female portraits will wane together with the 17th century and with Ottoman rule in Hungary, and so will several other elements of traditional courtly culture.

The next phase in the transformation of the representation of the Hungarian aristocracy was connected to the Mausoleum, a series of representations of Hunno-Hungarian leaders and Hungarian kings, which was published in 1664 at Nuremberg, and sponsored by Nádasdy. On the basis of some characteristic examples it can safely be stated that the serial production of noble ancestral portrait galleries began in the decade following the appearance of the Mausoleum engravings, and was conspicuously accompanied by an effort to root the past of the individual families through these portrait galleries in the very beginnings of Hungarian history. It was then that the portrait series began to be completed with the representations of ancestors beyond one generation, for which the composition of the Mausoleum engravings was frequently put to use.

Since it is from the portrait series of the most important aristocratic families that the earliest adaptations of the Mausoleum engravings are known, the logical question arises of whether Ferenc Nádasdy himself ordered family portraits to be made on the model of the Mausoleum. The answer is no. Yet he turned with conspicuous attention towards portrait painting, his library catalogue containing six different volumes of engraved portraits, an outstanding number in this period. Likewise unique was his drive to create a portrait gallery by having his contemporaries eternalised in painting, thus establishing the virtual Hungarian royal court with the portraits of all the persons who held one of the chief offices in the period between 1645 and 1655. The beginning of his gallery of contemporaries was not unrelated to the ascending course of his public and political career, which began with his appointment as Master of the Hungarian Royal Court and his parallel accession to the chief office-holders (1646). His appointment as secret court councillor (1662) and royal lieutenant (1667), on the other hand, prompted him to give expression to his ever closer attachment to the imperial aristocracy in terms of portrait representation. Accordingly, Nádasdy, as he rose higher in the court hierarchy, and aimed at a closer integration into the Vienna elite, imitated the lifestyle of the court aristocracy and adopted their forms of representation. It was thus only natural that the artistic setting of his castle at Pottendorf in Lower Austria was characterised by the elements of imperial representation. Before all, by those series of imperial portraits of which three are listed by the castle inventory. Among the two series comntaining the portraits of Habsburg rulers, one was modelled upon the engravings of Francesco Terzio (Imagines Gentis Austriae), whereas the third was an adaptation of the popular series which followed Tizian's portraits of the Roman emperors or, to be correct, the engravings which Aegidius Sadeler made of them. The occasions which emphasised the social position of the judge royal, and offered the possibility of a close connection with the court, likewise prove that Nádasdy pursued a “two-way” personal representation, staging himself simultaneously as a member of two elites: an aristocrat of the Habsburg court and a leading office-holder of the Hungarian Kingdom. This accounts for the fact that he did not surround himself with representations of his family past embedded in national history. The message of his portrait representation spoke about himself, and reflected his real or desired status within his own social circle.

The research was triggered off by the documentation of the building history of the mausoleum of the Brüll family in the neolog Jewish cemetery in Kozma street, Budapest. The revived antique, in ante temple style mausoleum erected over a crypt was completed in 1902 as the joint work of architect Kálmán Gerster and sculptor Alajos Stróbl. The interior of the cell is adorned with a fine floral mosaic composition (cartoon by Ferenc Lohr).

At Békás in Veszprém county the sepulchral monument of the founder of the Society of Hungarian Engineers and Architects was unveiled in the Békássy–Hollán mausoleum in 1903. The periodical Művészet reported that the frescoes were painted by Dezső Kölber after cartoons by Károly Lotz. Documents in the Archives of the Veszprém Archiepiscopacy and Collegiate Chapter reveal that the chapel built in revival gothic style was consecrated on the day of the Sacred Name of the Virgin, on 12 September 1869, so that masses could be celebrated for the salvation of the departed souls. The church demanded that the builders provide guarantees for the survival of the chapel “until the end of time”. The architect’s name is not put down, but the article of 1903 expressly names Ybl as the planner of the funerary chapel, which has not been listed in his oeuvre so far.

During an assessment of art historical values we came across the ruins of the Ágoston–Kacskovics family’s mausoleum on the edge of Balatonboglár, in Szőlőskislak. Until 1993 the diocese of Veszprém also included Somogy County. The remains of the archaizing building displays several remarkable elements. One is the set of wall-lining bricks stamped with the initials LNJ, which are undoubtedly from the brick-yard of the architect Ödön Lechner’s family in Kőbánya. The other is a glazed, ribbed-surface ornamental brick type arranged around the red triangular limestone symbolizing the eye of God in the pediment. Earlier, this brick type was known on the St. Ladislaus church in Kőbánya and the façades of the Museum of Applied Arts (1896) both planned by Lechner. The floor pavers – produced by Wienerberger – were acquired in Vienna. It is again the obligation for maintenance in good condition that accounts for ample documents kept in the Archiepiscopal Library, which reveal that the crypt was consecrated in 1883, the chapel in 1884, on the feast day of Saint Ignatius Loyola. The erection of the chapel might have been related in connection with the re-burial here of landowner Ignácz Kacskovics, lord lieutenant of the county (and maybe with the change of the manorial centre). The use of the Lechner “design” bricks here precedes the well-known examples by a decade. The building was designed by József Áoston of Kisjóka, who qualified as an engineer from the Technical University of Budapest in 1875.

In the central cemetery of Pécs there are two similar historicizing family mausoleums close to each other. The classicizing monuments also displaying motifs of the Jugendstil were built in 1909 (and later?) from the terracotta elements of the Zsolnay Factory of Pécs. The mausoleum of the Nagy family who played an important role in the life of the city is still privately owned. The other one underwent a strange metamorphosis in 1963, as it was not redeemed again. The party committee of the city decided to convert it into a labour movement pantheon, and had the cross surrounded by palm branches in the pediment replaced by the red star. (The classicist character suited the socialist realist ideal of the fifties.) Their conservation in their current form is justified.

Summary

The illustrated genealogy of the Esterházys was published in 1700 on behalf of Pál Esterházy (1635–1713) the first Prince of the Family. By constructing a genealogical series going back in the past they used beside the Mausoleum of 1664 a lot of different models. In this paper copies from the Ducum Brabantiae Chronica (1600) and from the late 17th century portraits of the Ancestors' Gallery (Burg Forchtenstein) are identified. The main source of the portrait paintings was the Theatrum Pictoricum by David Teniers, a series of graphic reproductions of famous paintings in the imperial collection.

In recent decades, especially in German language areas, several monographs and studies have stressed the source value in political and social history of the representative relics of burial places and sepulchral art. The resting places of Hungarian aristocrats of the early modern age are also more than mere (style historical, iconographic) sources of “traditional” art historical investigations, as is also pointed out by several recent scientific works in Hungary.

Lord Chief Justice Ferenc III Nádasdy (1623–1671) had the Nádasdy family mausoleum built in Léka (Lockenhaus, Austria). The converted aristocrat commissioned Pietro Orsolino, master builder from Siena, to erect a church and monastery for the Augustinian hermits and the population of the small Transdanubian village. The innovation of the crypt completed in 1669 lies in admitting solely the remains of the Nádasdy family members according to the original concept of the chief justice, thus becoming the first family mausoleum in the crypt of a church running the whole length of the church space.

When Ferenc Nádasdy was executed for his part in the Wesselényi conspiracy against the court in Vienna in 1671, there were two tombs in the central space of the crypt to which an ornamental staircase led from the middle of the nave of the oval church. The chief justice had the double tomb (c. 1562) of his great grandparents palatine Tamás Nádasdy and Orsolya Kanizsay – an outstanding specimen of 16^th century Hungarian sepulchral art – transferred from the chapel of Léka castle. The tomb is covered with a late gothic slab showing the palatine and his wife kneeling at the stem of the cross. The monumental baroque tomb of Ferenc Nádasdy and his wife Anna Julianna Esterházy (c. 1669) was probably made by masters of the Léka guild of builders and masons.

Research of the past years has shown that extensively travelled and highly cultured Ferenc Nádasdy was one of the most conscious aristocratic patrons of the art in Hungary who put the arts sharp-wittedly in the service of his own representation and the political propaganda of the Hungarian Kingdom. In his residences (Keresztúr, Sárvár, Seibersdorf, Pottendorf) he set up picture galleries with different representative goals each; as the holder of the advowson, he had churches (Lorettom, Léka) and chapels (Mariazell, St Stephen’s chapel) founded and ordered altar paintings. He relied on printing to disseminate internationally the historical continuity of the Hungarian statehood threatened by the Ottoman Empire (Mausoleum) and the unity of the Hungarian nation of the estates (series of Widemann portraits).

The crypt of the Léka church was the place of the reverence of ancestors and the expression of Ferenc Nádasdy’s ambition to become palatine. By positioning his and his wife’s tomb opposite his great-grandfather’s in the crypt he founded, he implied his wish to become similar to his forefather. During his political career he failed to acquire the title of palatine, but the “adopter” of the art patron model created by Nádasdy, his brother-in-law Pál Esterházy attained it. Similarly to Nádasdy, Esterházy also had a family crypt built later in the centre of his residence Kismarton (Eisenstadt, Austria) emulating in concept the example of Léka and the Graz mausoleum of Ferdinand II as regards form.

The authors first review the investigations into the history of the lost mausoleum (türbe) and the surrounding complex of Sultan Süleyman who died during the siege of Szigetvár on September 7, 1566. Then they narrate the establishment in 2012 (reshaped in 2015) of a research group which, by developing a new concept and using interdisciplinary research methods (including landscape reconstruction), found the remnants (foundations) of the türbe on the top of the Turbék-Zsibót vineyard hill in autumn 2015, then, during the rounds of excavation in 2016–2017, the foundations of the adjacent mosque and dervish convent as well as the traces of a fourth building. Regarding the date of the construction of the complex, the authors are of the opinion that the main buildings must have been built around 1575. Finally, they enlarge on the reception of the findings and the potential the site offers for touristic and regional development.

It was to Yahyapasa-oglu Mehmed Pasha, sancakbeyi of Semendire (1527-1534, 1536-1543, 1548-1550?) and pasa of Buda (1543-1548), that Ottoman Belgrade owed the erection of one of the biggest and most versatelite vakifs, which srtongly affected the growth of the city's new urban structure. Mehmed Pasha's evkaf in Belgrade consisted of a mosque, a mekteb, a medrese, an 'imaret, a karvansaray, a sebil, a cesme, and Mohamed Pasha türbe (mausoleum), all constituting a well-structured architectural complex. Bexond the complex, it also included a musalla, a tekke, and shops and lots of market place. By 1548 most of the structure had already been built, and they lasted till 1688. The state assisted in providing for the evkaf by granting Mehmed Pasha the full ownership (mülk) of large number of vacant lots in the city, a few nearbly villages, and subsequently, some estates in the sancak of Požega. The study of the compositiopn and functioning of Mehmed Pasha's Belgrade evkaf indeed confirms the assumptions about a well throught out state policy as regards the development of the urban structure of major Ottoman communities.

The paper offers a brief survey of the excavations and conservation of the ruins of the medieval provostal church of SzEkesfehErv·r, that took place between 1936 and 1938, in connection with the 900th anniversary of the death of King Saint Stephen I of Hungary, celebrated with large-scale programs in 1938 (the King was the founder of the provostship, which became the place of coronation of the medieval rulers of Hungary, and at the same time the burial-place of Saint Stephen and many of his successors). In this process the art historian Tibor Gerevich, leader of the National Office for the Protection of Historic Monuments played an important role. The building of the so called mausoleum, where the marble sarcophagus from the 11th century, considered as the monument of Saint Stephen was placed in the centre, and a semicircular-arched gallery for the purpose of a lapidary were built on the border of the excavated territory. The buildings were designed by the young architect Géza Lux, in a modest, elegant style referring to the brickwork of some Italian Romanesque churches. The ensemble is an important part of the history of monument protection in Hungary, and at the same time it offers the highest level of the official state architecture of its age.