Folia Historica 29. (Budapest, 2014)

II. KÖZLEMÉNYEK - Apor Eszter: Biedermeier mikrográfiák a Történelmi Képcsarnokban

BIEDERMEIER MICROGRAPHIES IN THE HISTORICAL GALLERY

Summary

There are six special micrographies in the graphic collection of the Historical Gallery at Hungarian National Museum. They represent the portraits of famous Hungarian aristocrats, also Austrian Emperor and Hungarian King, Francis II (I).

Generally the compositions are similar to handbook's frontispieces from the beginning of the 19th century. In the centre the figures appear in rounded frames and on the top and bottom of the sheets are another inscriptions, captions or signatures.

German and Latin handwritten texts decorate also the faces, hair and clothes of the figures. The written details forms a unity with the figures: the texts follow the forms, structures and tonicity of the portraits by form and colour of their calligraphic letters. The style of handmade drawings are very similar to each other.

I think because of their style, the six images were prepared by Ferdinand von Kirchner, author and impresario in the first half of the 19th century. After 1825 he worked in cooperation with Andreas Ernst, and both of them are related to the court of Emperor Francis II, in Vienna.

From literary point of view, the texts in the pictures fringe upon the genres of „shaped prose" and „shaped poetry". (These words are used by Dick Higgins and István Kilián.) Otherway the memorial sheets represent a special type of biedermeier image due to the visual dominance of texts and the elegant style of drawings.

The micrography as literary technical term is very near to „pattern poetry" genre. But according to researchers, it is a visual artistic phenomenon in the same time. In my essay 1 think about an other unknown technical term of this kind of micrography from the field of art history, for example „calligraphic technique" after ideas of Gisella Wilhelmb Cennerné.

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