Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

NEW ACQUISITIONS, NEW RESULTS - Gábor ENDRŐDI: St. Sebastian, place of origin unknown, ca. 1515-20

of the Nagyócsa (Ocová) altar of St. Nicholas and St. Antony Abbot to this workshop, which is dated to 1514 on the basis of its restored inscription. Glatz has suggested further attributions, but these do not seem to me to be as convincing as the ones mentioned.

7 Even within this smaller group there are vast differences in quality: though the Nagyócsa figures represent the highest quality in Northern Hungarian sculpture in the period, which the Mosóc apostles approach, too, we would have a far less flattering opinion of the craftsmanship of the sculptor on the basis of the figures of the Dobronya altarpiece or the Madonna of Karásznó; differences of a like nature separate the marginal figures from the main figures of the Mosóc and the Dobronya altarpieces. Within this group of figures, it is only possible to compare the naked male body that naturally has a central role in the Budapest St. Sebastian statue with the side figure of the Mosóc altar already mentioned, which shows a very close relationship with our figure in not only its position, but its modelling, too. However, it has much less to offer in the carving of the loin cloth and the head. Much like clusters of bananas, the locks of the St. Sebastian of Mosóc re-appear in the Budapest sculpture, but form a richer, more composite grid, the close parallels of which are to be found in the hair of some of the Dobronya Apostles, St. Simon of Mosóc or St. Nicholas of Nagyócsa. It is within this circle of statues that we ought to look for further parallels of the characteristic details of the sculpture under discussion. However little opportunity it offered the artist, the folding of the loin cloth represents a marked drapery style. Characteristically, its cloth - just before it reaches its other end above the right thigh - is scrunched into a flat puff, or the dimples in its drapery end by dividing or turning into short, wedge-like grooves, making the pleat crests follow finely curling lines. There is an even more conspicuous consonance to be witnessed when studying the faces. The soft undulation in the facial surface of the Budapest St. Sebastian gives this detail a particular sensibility only the best pieces in the group have, but is wholly alien to the group in the Dobronya Death of Mary. The oval head and the physiognomy however do have their somewhat more roughly carved parallels in the figure of St. John the Evangelist in the Dobronya altar, and the types of little roundish eyes and wavy, slackly hanging eyelids have theirs in some of its older Apostle figures. The figure whose origin is traditionally traced to Mateóc was part of a shrine, like the ones preserved in the Mosóc and the Dobronya altarpieces. Also the shaping of its details is closer to these, rather than that of the half a decade earlier Nagyócsa sculptures. However, the retable - and herein lies the chief interest of the St. Sebastian in my opinion - to which the sculpture had once belonged is most likely to have outstripped the extant retables related: the Budapest sculpture is one and a half times as high as the side figures of the Mosóc and the Dobronya shrines, and, in respect of quality, surpasses not only these, but also some of the main figures. NOTES 1 It was registered in the National Museum inventory under number 83/1926. Cf. Tíz év szerzeményei 1919-1928 (A Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum kiállításai, 5). Budapest, 1928, p. 18; Varjú, Elemér. Vezető a Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Történeti Osztálya kiállított gyűjteményeiben. Budapest, 1929, p. 74. 2 See the minutes taken at the 1803 canonical visit at Mateóc; Státny archív v Levoci - pobocka Levoca, Spisské biskupstvo, kanonické vizitácie, kart. 4, fol. 4v, 3 "I beg your pardon, this is a piece of Lőcse craftsmanship," are the words with which Móric Kornfeld showed a piece in his collection according to anecdote in the memoirs of Lajos Gogolák. What he actually meant by this, or what Gogolák did, whose memory might have been inexact, may be characterized by the answer Tibor Gerevich made ("1 beg your pardon, my dear Móric, this is unfortunately fake!") and the rejoinder Kornfeld made referring to the connoisseurship of Simon Meiler. Cf. Gogolák, Lajos. "Romemlékek (II)." Published by Béla Nóvé in: Holmi 13 (2001), p. 508. As a matter of fact, no known piece of the Kornfeld collection meets the said description; cf. Mravik, László ed. The "Sacco di Budapest" and Depredation of Hungary, 1938-1949. Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 1998, pp. 353-359. 4 Kampis, Antal. Középkori faszobrászat Magyarországon (A Magyarságtudomány könyvei, 3). Budapest: Officina, 1940, p. 91; cf. also Radocsay, Dénes. A középkori Magyarország faszobrai. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1967, pp. Ill, 198 f. 5 This is the retable the literature and the canonical-visit minutes have always called the St. Philip and St. Jacob altar. This definition seems fitting in view of the cross in the hand of the sculpture on right-hand side of the shrine (which, however, in its current form, can hardly be said to be original), but contradicts the physiognomy of the sculptures and the club (the originality of which is not certain either) in the hand of the other figure. This latter attribute and the beard and hair style of the figures have led us to think that the retable is more probable to have stood on an altar consecrated to St. Simon and St. Jude Thaddeus. In the beginning of the 20

lh century, the shrine - together the two 15

,h-century altar wings and three superstructure figures perhaps from the early 16"' century - was built into a retable composition still visible. The wings belonging originally to the shrine were identified by Anton Glatz (Glatz, Anton C. Gotické umenie zo zbierok Slovenského národného múzea v Martine. Martin, 1985, pp. 56-58), but they do not help identify the shrine statues, because it is only with regard to one of the eight panels (the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew) that its theme might be related to those of the wings. 6 Glatz, Anton C. "Neskorogotické sochárstvo horného Ponitria v zbierkach Múzea v Bojniciach." In: Horná Nitra 9 (1980), p. 122 f. 7 Glatz, Anton C. "Gotické sochárstvo v zbierkach Stredoslovenského múzea, II, cast'." In: Stredné Slovensko 3 (1984), 286; idem. op. cit (see Note 5), pp. 5860; idem. ed. Gotické umenie z bratislavskych zbierok. Bratislava: Slovenská Národná Galéria, 1999, p. 52. With regard to the Last Judgment fragment in the Galéria mesta Bratislava and Death of Mary relief in the Ipolyi Collection, see my review of the book last referred to, in: Művészettörténeti Értesítő 51 (2002), pp. 206-211, 216, and note 33. The greatest difficulty with Glatz' view according which the sculptor was from the workshop of the Pulkau altar is that, though it probably points in the right direction, it does not take account of the stylistic discrepancy that separates the marginal figures he refers to from the other figures of the Pulkau altar; see Rosenauer, Artur ed. Spätmittelalter und Renaissance (Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Österreich, 3). Munich: Prestel, 2003, p. 358.