Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 32. (Budapest, 2018)
Miklós GÁLOS: An Antonio Tempesta Rediscovered in the Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest
stone served as the craggy shore. On the left, standing on one such cliff is the main figure in the composition, Moses, raising his staff. Surrounding him, arranged in different groups, are the Israelites who have already been saved. On the right are the Jews who have just recently crossed the sea with their animals. Above them, in the background, are the tiny figures of the Egyptian army drowning in the sea. The name of Adam Elsheimer was scribbled at the bottom of the stone. Nine years later, Höllrigl published a thorough account of his discovery.1 He attempted to uncover the painting’s origins, determine the exact stone material used, and place the work within the oeuvre of Adam Elsheimer (1578—1610). His identification of the stone is still accepted today: the material is not marble but limestone breccia.2 However, the attribution of the work to Elsheimer, based on the inscription added later, has proved incorrect. The proposed date and location of its creation, on the other hand, come close to the truth. A year after Höllrigl published his account, the object, which had been restored in the interim, was put on public display.3 During the large-scale reorganization of the state collections in Budapest in the 1930s, the work was placed in the Museum of Fine Arts (in 1937).4 There, when editing the 1954 catalogue of the museum’s Old Masters’ Gallery, Andor Pigler rejected the attribution to Elsheimer, which had been based on the later inscription and was clearly not supported by the features of the composition. Instead, in the catalogue, he recorded the painting as the work of an unknown German master active in the first half of the 17th century.5 It was Ágnes Czo- bor who succeeded in determining that the Budapest picture was the work of Antonio Tempesta, basing her conclusion on a signed painting on an oval stone slab (in this case alabaster), also showing the Crossing of the Red Sea, in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome.6 It is not surprising that in 1962, Ágnes Czobor had to rely on the writings of the 17th-century biographer Giovanni Baglione when describing the works of the Florentine-born Antonio Tempesta (c. 1555-1630), who was active in Rome.7 Tempesta, known as an engraver, was remembered for his prints of hunting and battle scenes and his large-scale narrative series. However, his fresco commissions from his early years in Rome and his later paintings, usually on stone, were unknown. His paintings remained largely undiscovered in public collections, often listed as the works of other artists, while those in private collections also escaped the notice of researchers and remained unpublished.8 Yet, by the first decades of the 17th century, Tempesta, whom Caravaggio had proclaimed a capable painter, had achieved a prestige similar to that of the most important artists in Rome, as evidenced by his election as one of the rettore of the Accademia di San Luca.9 Although even Aby Warburg himself proclaimed the need for a monograph on Tempesta, a catalogue raisonné of Tempesta’s work to this day has never been compiled.10 Ágnes Czobor’s attribution of the painting to Tempesta has been generally accepted in the literature. In the last few decades, interest in paintings on stone and in Antonio Tempesta, who was active on this field, has expanded to include the painting in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts too. As one of the few authentic Tempesta works in a public collection, it received special attention in both surveys of paintings on stone and also in monographs on the painter.11 8
