Mikó Árpád – Verő Mária - Jávor Anna szerk.: Mátyás király öröksége, Késő reneszánsz művészet Magyarországon (16–17. század) 2. kötet (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2008/4)

The English Summary of Volumes I—II

ERNŐ MAROSI ACROSS THE ALPS The Apparent Crossroads of the Renaissance in Hungary around 1500 and after The 15

th century humanists clearly perceived the cultural differences between Hungary and Italy. Revealing evidence of this awareness comes from Janus Pannonius' early-flowering Transdanubian almond tree, and even more so the distich he wrote for Galeotto, complaining that he wrote more like Latin in Latium, but like a barbarian in the land of the barbarians (In Latus scripsifortasse Latinius oris, /at nunc barbarico barbára in orbe crepo), and was in need of polishing (Tu tarnen haec talipoteris deducere lima). The early spring and the images of improving polish encapsulate what is most important: progress was a Renaissance idea, certainly in the sense of overcoming the Middle Ages. Certainly, the Hungarian humanist tradition conceived the Muses flowing into the Danube as a process starting with Janus, and the tombstone inscriptions of Péter Garázda and János Megyericsei counted three generations of it. These epitaphs bear witness to fifty unbroken years looked back on by a scholarly elite, surviving the death of Matthias and the start of the new century. They give good grounds for the viewpoint of the older historiography of Hungarian art and culture, a concentration on the persistence of Matthias-era humanist and Renaissance traditions. This aesthetic-artistic awareness drew a dividing line which cannot be over-emphasised, seeing value in the culture and art only of the Italianinspired all'antica style. The art objects which actually predominated all over the country - buildings and their decoration and furnishings, objects of everyday use - were completely left out of this assessment, being things which the humanists clearly would not have looked on as art at all, but rather the products of artisans and craftsmen. The art-history concept of the Hungarian Renaissance still in vogue today is based on a tradition which started in the Matthias Era and defined the whole style phenomenon for a sustained period. The canonical form of this concept, documented in visual completeness by the Schallaburg/Budapest Matthias exhibition in 1982/83, was formulated by Jolán Balogh and retained its dominance for a long time. Of particular importance were two new insights: that the Matthias era studios did not suddenly come to an end; and that the followers of the tradition were sophisticated in newer and more modern styles. What looks like a "crossroads" for the Renaissance was, looked on from the urban environment, a converging of "late Medieval" vernacular and elite cultures. It concerned the old and the new in traditional, style-centred art history and the "overcoming" of the former by the latter. The "overcoming" hypothesis does not stand up, however, as demonstrated by the incomplete development of Renaissance architecture, in the sense of Burckhardt's space-style concept. At this point is necessary to clarify what we see as the issues of "Northern Renaissance" and "German Renaissance". Its basis is the application of Burckhardt's space-style categories to phenomena which went on north of the Alps in parallel with Italian developments. The starting point was the methodology of August Schmarsow, in whose school the Late Gothic style appeared as the separate way of the Northern Renaissance in Germany. Later, the same separate-way thesis was developed in the Franco-Flemish artistic milieu by Louis Courajod, and it was in his wake that Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert introduced the renaissance septentrionale in Flemish painting (1905). The basis for the ideas of Schmarsow and the "deutsche Sondergotik" was provided by Burckhardt, who regarded Gothic architecture as an organic style formation which theoretically stood in opposition to the space-style concept. The theory of the Renaissance which does not incorporate the rebirth of antiquity, i.e. sees it as independent of the Italian way, is a distinctive product of early 20

th century art historiography working with general art historical categories. In Hungarian art historiography, which in other regards did not enthusiastically espouse either the formalistic, aesthetic or psychological doctrines of the style history method, the separate way to the Renaissance and above all the special characteristics of artistic feeling and temperament found a warm response. Thus, partly via the Proto-Renaissance put forward as the Hungarian separate way, and partly in respect of the Central European context ("influences"), Hungarian art histories have placed this question within the discussion of the Late Gothic. Since the early 20

th century it has only been possible to approach the causes and origins of the issues covered by the terms "Gothic and Renaissance" and "Gothic in the Renaissance" by an examination of the mentality (intellectual history phenomenon, social behaviour) conceived — and personally experienced — by Warburg as an internal contradiction of world-view, and no longer by distinction of style phenomena and movements. We have a highly accurate account of the "influences", i.e. the phenomena of reception of Netherlandish realism and their chronology. It is known that reception of Late Gothic realism was a process which started around 1470, and involved the phenomena linked with the Schottenstift Master of Vienna, actually Nicolaus Gerhaerts van Leiden, and Hans Pleydenwurff of Nuremberg. The most important result of Szilárd Papp's latest research is the elucidation of the South GermanSwabian origins of the Hungarian movement of Late Gothic architecture which started in the Matthias Era. The change of