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

ÁRPÁD MIKÓ RENAISSANCE, HUNGARIAN RENAISSANCE, RENAISSANCE IN HUNGARY Scenes from the Story of Research into a Style Period This brief essay looks at the story of research into the Renaissance in Hungary. Rather than giving the whole picture, it selects some details, not always in chronological continuity. (Some important names have been omitted and others only touched on.) An obstacle to this exercise is the lack of a thorough account of Hungarian art historiography, only a few sections being known of in any depth. (Other branches of scholarship are no better off in Hungary; only ethnography has had a modern historical treatment.) Although the basic research is lacking, it is clear that two things must be clearly distinguished in the story of research: one is the history of objects linked to this style period and the other is the story of the style period itself. The history of the objects is older than the history of the period, and as in other areas, ready themes from other kinds of treatments were taken over in the second half of the 19

th century. A good example is the Bibliotheca Corvina, King Matthias' library, whose items were identified and researched in the 18th century and even before; late 19

th century art historians simply inherited a complete description. One of the earliest professional representatives of Hungarian historiography, Imre Henszlmann, who dealt mainly with medieval art and regarded Gothic as a national style, was also very familiar with Renaissance works. For him, the "Renaissance" stretched from the Matthias Era to the mid-17

th century. He examined a great many relics and dated all'antica carvings found at an excavation he led at Bács Castle to the late 15

th-early 16

th centuries. He was not disparaging about the Renaissance style. Another founder of Hungarian art history, Arnold Ipolyi, also used the term Renaissance in 1859, using it to refer to art of the 16

th-18

th centuries (and including what we now call Baroque), but had a rather low overall opinion of it; he regarded even the figurative gravestones as worthy of collection only for the subjects represented, members of the national pantheon. Much data was also published by Viktor Myskovszky, the enthusiastic amateur historian, on Renaissance relics in Upper Hungary (mainly from the then counties of Szepes and Sáros), usually at a highly debatable standard. Ferenc Pulszky, the cultured and well-travelled scholar and Director of the National Museum between 1869 and 1894, devoted a long section to the history of Renaissance art in Hungary in his work Magyarország archaeologiája, published in 1897. He measured domestic products against universal yardsticks, so that his attention was almost exclusively confined to Italian imports — and Italian artists who came to Hungary — during the Matthias Era. Similar impartiality was shown by László Eber — a representative of "rational" art history in pre-First World War Hungary — on the all'antica stone carvings of Buda Palace. The post-First World War period and the understandable shock of the Treaty of the Trianon brought major changes to art historiography. Two art history departments trained the next generation of researchers. One was led by Antal Hekler, the eminent classical archaeologist, who primarily encouraged archive research and placed particular emphasis on research into the Hungarian Renaissance and the Baroque. His stance was distinctly nationalist, and one of his declared aims was the proclamation of Hungarian cultural superiority. He had excellent pupils who were prominent in art history until the 1960s and 70s and did not share Hekler's ideological bias. Some eminent examples were Anna Zádor on the neoclassical period, Mária Aggházy and János Kapossy on the Baroque and Tamás Bogyay and Dénes Radocsay on medieval art. He also taught Jolán Balogh, the greatest Renaissance art historian of the 20

th century. The other art history department was led by Tibor Gerevich, author of a synthesis of Hungarian Romanesque art, whose ideological leanings were similar to Hekler's. His pupils included Ilona Berkovits, who studied medieval miniature painting and — in great depth — the Renaissance era; her most significant writing was done before 1945. Although most of these historians worked on after the Second World War and art historiography was also affected by the subsequent political changes (Sovietisation), it was Jolán Balogh who dominated research into the Renaissance. In the nineteen twenties, at the start of her career, she laid the foundations of her life's work through researches in Italian archives, and then carried out pioneering collection of artefacts in Transylvania. In 1933/34 she published a style-history outline of Hungarian Renaissance architecture and stone carving, setting out the principles she was to maintain for the rest of her life. These stated that Italian Renaissance art was brought into the country by Matthias, the national king, and the Hungarians took up as their own the new style he had promoted, sustaining it in the 16

th and 17

th centuries, so that it ultimately also fertilised folk art. The Renaissance style spread out from Matthias' royal palace to Székely villages, whereupon it completed its calling. This conceptual structure lay behind all of Jolán Balogh's monumental works: the three volumes treating the relationship between King Matthias and art (completed in 1944 and published in 1966, 1975 and 1985), the iconography of the King (1940), and her first volume on the Transylvanian Renaissance (1943). Even in 1982, it was these concepts which lay behind the King Matthias art history exhibition in Schallaburg, the apotheosis of Jolán Balogh's Renaissance research. This view, formed in the late 1920s and rigidly maintained for some fifty years, was very difficult to change. Péter Meller's