Takács Imre: Az Árpád-házi királyok pecsétjei (Corpus sigillorum hungariae mediaevalis 1. Budapest, 2012)
Introduction
who have easiest access to them only rarely regard the seals as works of art. Although the Hungarian National Archive produced a highly practical first guide to the seals in 1889,236 systematic art-history research into seals has had to forego the indispensable “encounter experience”, the impression of the real quality of the objects provided by observations of the originals, and rely on the collections of copies and photographs that have been produced since the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, these collections of impressions and castings, with all of their the degradations of surface and material quality, permitted real progress in typological studies and art-historical publication.237 Work on collecting copies and developing the collections accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in several studies and the two descriptive catalogues already mentioned, although all of them suffer from the adverse consequences of this method.238 An art historical analysis of one pregnant motif common to a group of thirteenth century royal seals - the crown of thorns combined with the heraldic device of the double cross - drew attention to several components of Byzantine origin in the artistic representation of late Árpád era monarchs.239 The analysis of Queen Mary’s (1382-1395) royal seal gave insights into serial reproduction of art in the Hungarian Angevin court, and shed light on the medieval forms, textual background, and French court connections, of originality and reproduction.240 The seal of the Zagreb chapter depicts a church consecration, and its interpretation, coupled with a text analysis of the associated royal deed of gift, has helped to elucidate the history of this iconographic formula in Hungary.241 Similar lessons - particularly 236 Csánki 1889. 237 The HAS History Committee set a good example in setting up what were initially collections of plaster casts. The casts of Hungarian kings’ seals were put into the Hungarian National Archive, and photographs of them came to the Department of Auxiliary Sciences of History in Eötvös Loránd University. Two further institutions, the Budapest History Museum and the HAS Art History Research Group became involved in the continuation of the work. Sunkó 2006. 238 Prelates’ seals; Takács 1992. 239 Most relevant are the seal used for a short time by Stephen V (1270-1272), several seals of his son, Ladislaus IV, and the royal seal of the last king of the dynasty, Andrew III. Lajos Bernát Kumorovitz drew attention to the idiosyncratic combined motif of the crown and the cross and a descriptive inscription concerning it from the era of Stephen V: Kumorovitz 1942, p. 18. Subsequent detailed treatment of the motif in its context in the history of ideas and the history of art: Kovács 1984, pp. 407-423. 240 Marosi 1982, pp. 3-22. 241 Takács 1989, pp. 20-25. in iconography - have been learned from the discourse surrounding the municipal seal of Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia),242 and the scholarly debate concerning the dating and iconographic interpretation of the great seal of the Esztergom chapter.243 In the latter case, unlike that of the royal seals, which exist only as damaged wax impressions or even washed-out copies of these, we are in the fortunate position of having the original metal object, the matrix, which we can study as an individual work of art. The art historians who - since the 1980s - have been studying the iconography of the thirteenth-century seal matrix of the Benedictine Monastery of Pannonhalma and determining its place in style history, have enjoyed similar good fortune.244 The relatively extensive “formal sequence” (in George Kubler’s words)245 of medieval seals, with its certain chronology and interlinked chains of images, offers a good foothold for investigating and modelling general processes in art history, for interpreting isolated pieces outside the series, and determining their chronological position. Exploration of connections in the history of images and history of style also permits some missing links in the chain to be identified within the series, and outside it. It was Tibor Gerevich who noticed that medieval seals could be gap-filling relics for Hungarian art history, clearly drawing on their role in research in Germany and Austria.246 Studying them can tall us about the character and quality of lost monumental works of art, how changes in taste and style occurred, and the history of development of certain special image forms. Gerevich wrote on his monograph on Árpád era art that the seals “traverse the route of large sculpture in miniature.”247 242 Takács 1997, pp. 69-81; Kovács, I. 1998, pp. 339-351. 243 Takács I.: Az esztergomi székeskáptalan nagyobb pecsétnyomója. In: Pannónia Regia, p. 297, cat. V-7; Takács 2001, pp. 77-85; Solymosi 2004, pp. 20-24. 244 Sólymos pp. 1981, 136-138; Marosi 1981, pp. 138-139; Takács I.: A pannonhalmi konvent oklevele pecsétjével. In: Para- disum plantavit, pp. 100-101, 115-116. 245 Cf. Kubier 1962. 246 For more on this, see Kieslinger 1927, p. 32 et seq.; Erben 1931; Gall 1959, pp. 33-34. 247 Gerevich 1938, p. 209. Foremost among older literature elucidating the link between large sculpture and seals: Pinder 1911; cf. Nolle 1925, pp. 329-240. 54
