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
style around 1500 marks an internal boundary in the artistic culture of the Late Gothic, whose first generation is linked to Netherlandish art by Nikolaus Gerhaerts' contemporaries. In general, it is very important to bear in mind that the appearance of printed graphics in the second half of the 15 th century means more than a means of dating and a source for the study of composition: it marked the beginning of "the age of the technical reproducibility of art" (Walter Benjamin), and the hitherto unimaginable quantity of images by the start of the 16 th century provided the actual medium for the "Northern Renaissance". The apparent parallel existence of two different artistic cultures in early 16 th century Hungary is an illusion. Observations of how they made contact and interacted are therefore an important consideration. The first of these concerned the local influences of court art, the preference for Renaissance furniture and decorative elements (relief coats of arms, door and window frames, tabernacles, niches) in buildings having a Late Gothic structure. Set against the thesis of Italian art forms taking organic root in the court, notions of its influence necessarily adopted — such as Bialostocki's notion of development culminating in "vernacular Mannerism" — the proposition of foreign influences displacing traditional workshop practices and distorting in the direction of the "vernacular". This proposition was particularly deployed in connection with the integration of Renaissance motifs into Szepes altar art, and Transylvanian developments may be set in parallel with it. Clearly this is a transition between the "welsch" and the "deutsch" formal idioms, showing that there was more going on than the results of purely local contacts. The final architectural ornamentation of Gothic naturalism was retained even as all'antica forms came into use. It seems that contacts between artisans and models of workshop practice had much more effect on the renewal of the tectonics and ornamentation of the late Gothic altar than the local effects of migrant artists. Such phenomena are also encountered in the vicinity of Dürer and Cranach. Another architecture-related interpretation of motifs addresses the extent to which the Buda Renaissance acted as a precursors. This started with Götz Fehr's work on Buda sources for the Renaissance windows on the façade of Hradcany's Wladislaw Hall in Prague. Fehr also attributed considerable importance to the south portal of the Prague St George Church in the persistence in Saxony of the Renaissance formal idiom brought to Prague by Benedikt Ried (Annaberg, Jakob Heilmann's sacristy portal). The true significance of Fehr's Ried monograph is in being among the first to demonstrate the context of the "Danube Style" in architecture, and the close connections between Bavarian, Viennese, Bohemian and Saxon Late Gothic architecture. Another important phenomenon was rise in stature of the newly-capitalist Hungarian mining towns in the Danube region, which had a key part in the economic life of Europe at that time through the production of noble metals. It was in this geographical and social environment (in connection with which the name of Anton Pilgram used always to be mentioned) that Viennese-LowerAustrian Late Gothic architecture met its greatest reception. A not inconsiderable force on the artistic orientation of the Jagiello court in Buda in the time of Maximilian I was the dynastic link with the Habsburgs and consequently the interest in the output of the artistic circle of the Vienna court. The heralds and proclaimers of dynastic interests were the humanists associated with the Vienna court. The Sodalitas Danubiana humanists' attraction to Matthias' library and art is the best known phenomenon in this circle. Above all it was the humanist societies created and organised by Celtis, one of which was the Sodalitas Danubiana led by the young János Vitéz, which must have formed the intellectual background for the broad sphere of influence of the "Northern Renaissance". No less broad was the intellectual perspective, which ranged from the Erasmist orientation of Johannes Henckel, donátor of the St Johns Altar in Ló'cse (Levoca) to the humanist forerunners of the early Reformation. One representative of this donátor type was the 1528 sacristy portal in Kolozsvár (Cluj) made for the priest of the St Michael's Parish Church and certainly displaying a Lower Austrian background and broad humanist erudition. It was the shared learning and intellectual environment of Central European humanist circles that gave rise to the stylistic, heraldic and astrological notions of the two Wolphards, Adorján, the last Catholic parish priest, and his nephew István, the humanist city judge. This is perhaps the clearest indicator of the role of the "Northern Renaissance" in creating a new context, so often forgotten in the over-emphasis of Matthias Era precedents. Without this humanist, and later Reformation, context, our picture of the "early Renaissance" would be different, if we had one at all.
