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This paper examines the iconolographical origin of Johannes Sambucus’ emblem dedicated to Carlo Sigonio, which – according to its title – displays the difference between grammar, dialectics, rhetoric and history. I focus on the central female figure whose innocent nudity represents the truth and whose connection with the ideal historiography standing – balancing together with Dialectics and Rhetoric – on the head of the young virgin Grammar. The special relationship between History and naked truth also defines its symbolic connection with the costumes of the other two figures: Dialectics in rough working clothes and Rhetoric in her long luxury dress. Three symbolic animals also belong to the three female figures: a sphinx to Dialectics, a chimera to Rhetoric and a winged dog to History. Contextual examination of the emblem reveals the possible source of the strange winged dog symbol is Plutarch’s short story of Osiris and Isis. In addition, the paper draws attention to an ironic twist of History in connection with Carlo Sigonio that shows that its nudity is not always so innocent.
Biblical ‘emblems’ in Paul Celan'sTenebrae
A special case of intertextuality
Arckép és önarckép Verancsics Antal (1504–1573) és a művészetek
Portrait and self-portrait antal verancsics (1504–1573) and the arts
Antal Verancsics (1504-1573) was born in Sebenico (Šibenik) to a noble family and he got to Hungary through family relations: his uncle János Statileo (Statilić) was bishop of Gyulafehérvár. His political career started in the court of King John I (Szapolyai). In 1541 he followed the widow of the king, Izabella Jagiello to Transylvania and only changed over to the other king of Hungary, Ferdinand I’s court in 1549 where he filled high administrative positions. As a Habsburg envoy, he sojourned in the Ottoman Empire on two occasions and in 1568 he concluded the Treaty of Adrianople (Hadrianopolis, Edirne). On the zenith of his ecclesiastic career he became archbishop of Esztergom (1569) and eventually cardinal (1573). He went into historiography, too: he wrote some works and a considerable number of sources he collected survive. In his youth he wrote poems in Latin and Italian and was on good terms with painters and sculptors. Martino Rota, also born in Sebenico, was invited to Hungary by him. Several data confirm that he had a keen interest in portraits (he wrote an epigram on Dürer’s Melanchthon portrait); he ordered portraits of himself from Melchior Lorch, Martino Rota and Antonio Abondio. He organized that a Crakow painter should paint the portrait of John Sigismund elected King of Hungary, and his correspondence with his siblings about having a portrait of his father painted is known. Back from his first mission in Turkey, in 1558 he wrote an epigram on an enigmatic woodcut composition of a multitude of elements tailored to Sultan Suleyman I, and dedicated the emblem to Maximilian, crowned king of Bohemia and heir apparent to the Hungarian throne. This composition is included in the second edition of Johannes Sambucus’ Emblemata. Some tomes of his library featured – in line with the fashion of the age – supralibros, and as bishop of Eger, he had an ornate parchment codex, a Praefationale made (1563). The rather mediocre quality initials of the manuscript echo the humanist cult of letters which produced the most beautiful achievements of artistic calligraphy in the middle of the century. In one initial Verancsics himself appears, his tiny figure kneeling before Christ’s cross (fol. 42r). Verancsics was interested in the material relics of antiquity, too: in Transylvania he collected stone carvings, coins and Roman inscriptions. As bishop of Eger he perpetuated the restoration of the castle in a monumental inscription. Also attracted to sepulchral monuments, he had the tomb of one of his predecessors in the diocese damaged in the siege of 1552 restored. He wished to have his funerary monument in the St Nicholas church in Nagyszombat, one like his predecessor in the episcopacy of Esztergom Miklós Oláh had, with a portrait statue. It was eventually not made. Finally, an overview of the sources that can provide clues as to the artistic interests of Antal Verancsics reveals that most of the sources are in the – unpublished – collection of letter and the book of poems he compiled. His intellectual self-portrait also includes his attraction to the arts.
A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria egykori és mai késő reneszánsz kiállításának néhány művéről
About a Few Works in the Earlier and Present-Day Exhibition of Late Renaissance Art at the Hungarian National Gallery
Abstract
From a late 16th century Four Elements series two, the depictions of Air and Water, can be found in the Hungarian National Gallery. Another element is identified by the author in a painting of a female head at the Múzeum Červený Kameň. The picture is badly damaged, the original inscription is missing. On the basis of the ochre and red colours it can be taken for the allegory of Fire: the figure is holding a pair of tongs between two fingers. The picture in the Múzeum Červený Kameň is registered as a work by someone in the circle of Matthias Gundelach. When it turned out that the painting belonged to the Budapest series (whose style is alien to Gundelach), this attribution had to be discarded. The Budapest allegories are now put up in the exhibition as works created by someone close to Bartholomäus Spranger, but in the present paper they are defined as works by Spranger himself. It is first of all the depiction of Air that can be easily tied to the authentic works of the Prague painter (Venus, Ceres and Bacchus, c. 1590, Graz, Joanneum; Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene, 1591, Bucharest, Muzeul de Arte), while the rendering of Water is closest to the allegorical female figures in the lower part of his picture The Triumph of Knowledge (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). The pictures were probably painted in the early 1590s, which dating may be confirmed by the lack of any trace of J. Heintz's and H. von Aachen's influence. Art historians ascribe the change in Spranger's style to the influence of these two painters which began to be felt in the first half of the 1590s. This altered style is characterized by a metallic modelling, powerful contours and strong light-and-shade effects. The painting in the Múzeum Červený Kameň came to the museum from Alsó-Korompa (Dolná Krupa), from the country house formerly belonging to the Brunszvik, later to the Chotek families. This provenance is also a clue to the Budapest paintings. Chief justice Count József Brunszvik's collection was in Buda in the early 19th century, and about half of its items were transferred to Alsó-Korompa after his death. In the detailed inventory taken on that occasion no trace of the series or its parts can be found, which means that they did not originate from the Brunszvik collection. As the country house went over to the Chotek family through the marriage of József Brunszvik's daughter, it is not impossible that the Four Elements series had once been possessed by that family.
In 1983 the Hungarian National Gallery purchased a canvas tapestry painted in tempera as Ferenc Rákóczi II's itinerant tapestry. Originally it belonged to a series of seven pieces and was still in the Zboró (Zborov) castle of the Rákóczi family as late as around 1870. Another piece found its way into the Hungarian National Museum. What shed light on the iconography of the series was the identification of the engraving serving as precursor: the depictions visualize quotations from Horace's poems after the engravings of Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana, a book of emblems (Antwerp, 1607). The tapestry in the Hungarian National Gallery shows Diogenes with the hedonist philosopher Aristippus in dispute. In the other tapestry there are two pictures: the allegory of “material sobriety” and a parable of wise understanding and tractability illustrated with the story of the mythological twins Amphion and Zethus. The prototypes suggest that the series was made sometime in the 17th century, using the 1607 or 1612 Antwerp edition. As no copy of the publication can be traced in 17th-century Hungary, the cycle was probably not painted in Hungary, or in Central Europe. Since the tapestry cannot be found in any inventory of Prince Rákóczi's property, it was probably later imported, presumably in the 18th century – when the castle of Zboró was at the hands of the later owners Count Aspremont and Erdődy families.
The composition of the St Martin episode in the St Martin Church of Szombathely – formerly on display at the Hungarian National Gallery – originates in an engraving by Adriaen Collaert made after Jan van der Straet's (Giovanni Stradano) invention. Figure of Saint Martin in the painting dated to around 1653 is perhaps a crypto portrait of a person with initials “M(artinus) A” written on the dog's collar. Around him Hungarian noblemen are depicted. The coat of arms in the picture – maybe of the client who ordered it – is so far unidentified.
Succus Prudentiae: Hevenesi Gábor neosztoikus emblémáinak festészeti recepciója
Succus Prudentiae: applied emblematic reception of Gábor Hevenesi’s neo-stoic emblems
desideria emblematis elegiis et affectibus SS . Patrum illustrata . Antwerpen 1624 Daniel de La Feuille : Devises et emblemes anciennes et modernes: tirées des plus celebres auteurs, avec plusieurs autres nouvellement inventées et mises en latin, en
„Ut pictura meditatio”. A győri volt jezsuita rendház díszlépcsőinek dekorációja a jezsuita Mária-emblematika kontextusában
“Ut pictura meditatio”. The decoration of the staircase of the former győr jesuit college in the context of jesuit marian emblematics
FORRÁSOK Albertus Magnus : Opera omnia . P. jammy , Lyon 1651 . Jacobus Boschius : Symbolographia, sive De arte symbolica, Sermones Septem . Johann Caspar Ben card , Augsburg 1702 . Joachim Camerarius : Symbolorum et emblem atum ex
Abstract
Given the close iconographic association between the sea and fortune, it is perhaps not surprising that The Merchant of Venice offers a series of intriguing interplays on this theme. These relate to the casket episodes, Antonio's sea-borne argosies, and the repayment of Shylock's loan. Through a consideration of the representation of ortuna, principally in sixteenth century emblem books, the paper suggests that although fortune is presented as a fickle force of destruction, its/her consequent may be effected in several ways: through avoidance, through prudence, through learning, or through sheer good luck. It is argued that Shakepeare's text explores all of these possibilities, drawing vigorously on the ideas that underpin the iconic topoi of his own and previous ages.
The author analyses the Haban faience collection of the Bratislava City Museum—the oldest existing Slovak museum (founded in 1868). The first part of the text provides a chronological survey of the Haban ceramics acquisitions and informs about their exhibition, presentation and publishing. This is followed by the typology and chronology of the objects. Based on the type and colour of the glaze and the painted decoration as well as their typology, the artefacts are divided into the following groups: the oldest objects from the period before 1700, objects with other than white-coloured glaze, objects decorated with blue painting influenced by the Delft faience, pharmacy vessels, floor tiles, white-glazed objects from the period 1700–1730, Late or Post-Haban faience and the ceramics with guild emblems. Finally a Haban stove from Malacky castle is mentioned.
Zur Semiotik Einiger Musikinstrumente (Vorläufige Problemstellung)
Towards a Semiotics of musical instruments. Outlines of the problem
In spite of the promising recent development of comparative musicology (also including the study of musical instruments) and of semiotics (also including musical semiotics), there is no summarizing attempt to describe and analyze the “signs on musical instruments” phenomena, i.e. carved or painted parts of the instruments. The zoomorphic and anthropomorphic construction and forms of musical instruments, and of their parts, is a wide-ranging field of study. The paper shows some examples of ancient and folk music instruments, by using the common (Peircian) terminology in describing their signs in the proper sense of the word. Animal shells used as bodies of instruments, snake- and dragon-formed instruments, amorous heads on string instruments, human heads and devilish forms of bagpipes, paintings on piano’s wooden cases, emblems or coats of arms of the builders of the instruments — just there are some cases of signs of musical instruments. There are further allusions to musical signs as well.
