Lengyel László (szerk.): Devóció és dekoráció - 18. és 19. századi korolstormunkák Magyarországon - Studia Agriensia 7. (Eger, 1987)
Summary
SUMMARY PREFACE I. THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION ENTITLED DEVOTION AND DECORATION EGER, OCTOBER 17, 1984. In Hungary many exhibitions open each year but only very few are significant. Fewer but better thought out exhibitions with more ground work and thus better planned would be of more benefit to Hungarian museums than the riot of commercial exhibitions. We cannot accuse the Museum of Eger of holding diluted exhibition programmes in all cases. We can say that here only serious undertakings appeared before the mass audience. Now they have come up with such material with which they firstly directed an overview of a national theme and which they joined to a scientific and collecting programme which is current throughout Europe. This scientific and collecting programme is of a historcal-sociological, ethnographic and art historical type. Mostly this is sacramental ethnography but it is also more than that: a slice of Hungarian cultural history. I do not want to complicate the thing, I can synthesize the subject of the exhibition with a single designation: devout artistry. This is signified in the title by the word Devotion: within the sense of this Latin word there is the pledge, the sacrifice and the belief in something — even magic and over and above this the possibility of damning as well. The directors thought it good and important to define the thing with the notion of Decoration. While in an antique sense the decor signifies propriety, honesty, neatness, elegance, beauty and ornament. If someone from one sort of faith wishes to make something decent and neat which is in its material form perhaps unattractive, even repulsive like a piece of crumbled bone or skin then that person is decorating is some way, somehow dressing up. In the special sense of the word, practises art. We can also say that someone makes a pledge with this, offers a sacrifice to the subject or object of his desire; his activities are a sort of fervour. This activity is, I repeat artistry: there is a relation to art but it is not original work in itself. A kind of luxury with modest artistic claim and with which everybody could live according to their own desires; not only those who created these objects in the monas130
