Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 31. (Budapest, 2017)

Ildikó PANDUR: Restoration of Metalwork from the Esterházy Treasury in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts: Past, Present and Future

lavish album with colour reproductions of exhibits, some from more than one angle.23 Dömötör contributed to the first in the museum’s series of yearbooks in 1954 with an article on important questions in metalwork restoration.24 One of the workshop’s staff members, Joachim Szvetnik, became the first internationally renowned restorer, and his methods (such as making tools similar to those with which the object was made) launched a new school in the profession.25

There are several pieces of metalwork restored by these 1950s pioneers that would be approached in a somewhat different way today. Among the first pieces of the treasury to be restored (between 1953 and 1955) was a magnificent 15th-century vessel, a so-called Pilgrim Bottle.26 This was divided longitudinally into two halves to enable the deformities to be hammered out from the inside. ‘The serious damage to

the bottle required it to be taken apart along its soldered joints by heat treatment at about 800 degrees. The deformities could only be straightened following this process’.27 (Fig. 4-5) On the Vezekény Basin,28 so much material became detached while it was being hammered out that the solder used to repair the cracks increased the weight of the object by about half a kilogram. (Fig. 6)

The prevailing attitudes to art works at that time seem somewhat alien to us today. Several authors claimed that the museum’s basic and first-order task of safeguarding objects could be overridden by the demands of display. In 1954, Dömötör wrote, ‘The deficiencies of modern-age craft objects often have to be fully replaced. The additions must always be made so that the viewer may enjoy the artwork in its original beauty and so that the presence of the

6. Detail of the ruined Vezekény Basin, Museum of Applied Arts, Archive

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