Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 32. (Budapest, 2018)
Miklós GÁLOS: An Antonio Tempesta Rediscovered in the Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest
Our surprise at this discovery increased when we carefully turned over the various fragments: the very thin, scarcely 1-mm- thick stone slab was painted on the other side, too. On this side, the frame’s insert was missing; the fragments were lying on a sheet of glass. The Garden of Eden with the Creation of Eve could be seen. (Fig. 7) The Lord, in a deeply pleated red cloak, lifts Eve out of the reclining Adam’s side. Eden’s landscape is filled with animals. At the base of the tree, behind the Lord, are two lions; colourful birds perch in the tree and on the rock beside the Lord sits a weasel. The central space is dominated by two horses, one standing and the other lying, with a rabbit, dog, fox and hen in front of them. In the background is a buffalo, camel, elephant and ostrich. The tiger in the middle was revealed only when the varnish and overpaintings were removed. When the painting was discovered, its place was occupied by an extremely poor overpainting of a snake fashioned out of the tiger’s tail. On the right, water fowl and different types of deer and a goat can be seen.14 The blue of the lapis lazuli was an integral part of the composition on this side too, forming the cliffs in the background and the water of a river or a lake to the right. The crowd of extraordinarily precise tiny figures, the bold foreshortenings and effective animal depictions suggest the two paintings are the work of an important painter. The figures are clearly Italian and point to an artist schooled in the Roman works of Raphael. The influence of Raphael is manifest not only in general features but in very specific instances as well. For example, the motif of the child clinging to his mother, on the left of the scene showing the Crossing of the Red Sea, was borrowed from a fresco presenting the same subject in the Vatican Loggie. The tur- baned repoussoir figure recalls the figure of Omphalé, the seated female nude seen from the back, in the ceiling fresco depicting The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche in the Villa Farnesina.15 This kind of miniaturization of Raphael’s monumental figures was characteristic of late Mannerist artists at the end of the 16* century. The composition Crossing the Red Sea also bears such late Mannerist features: sudden changes in scale and crowdedness juxtaposed with emptiness. The Edenic landscape on the reverse, with its more naturalistic approach, is already an example of the early Baroque. The creator of this work was thus an artist at the threshold between late Mannerism and early Baroque; he was also a master of both historical scenes and animal depictions and managed to integrate the stone support perfectly into the painted image. Within minutes of our discovery of this damaged work, we already had an idea of whose work we beheld: before us lay not one but two hitherto unknown paintings by Antonio Tempesta.16 This was the same Tempesta who was responsible for the work Höllrigl had discovered ninety years earlier. History had repeated itself. The joy of discovery was tempered only by the condition of the work. Höllrigl’s painting was merely broken, whereas ours was not only shattered, but large fragments of the support were missing. When the painting was lifted from the frame, the strips of tape along the edge, holding the picture together, could be seen. Having accepted that certain parts were forever lost, we could only hope that the original painted areas covered by either the tape or the later plaster additions were still intact. 13
