Mikó Árpád szerk.: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum" M S Mester vizitáció-képe és egykori selmecbányai főoltára (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1997/1)
TANULMÁNYOK / ESSAYS - MENRÁTH PÉTER-HERNÁDY SZILVIA: M S mester Vizitáció-képének restaurálása
PÉTER MENRÁTH - SZILVIA HERNÁDY THE RESTORATION OF PANEL PAINTING BY MASTER M S THE VISITATION In 1982, following many years of restoration work aimed at saving and recreating objects often deteriorated almost to the point of ultimate decay, the permanent exhibition of late-Mediaeval winged altars, panel paintings and wooden sculptures owned by the Hungarian National Gallery's Old Hungarian Collection was opened in the Royal Palace of Buda Castle, in the chamber once used as the throne room. For nearly ten years now, on entering the antechamber to the throne room, visitors have been greeted by Master M S's Visitation, the most cherished piece of the collection's selected artworks displayed there. According to the view generally accepted by art historians yet never proven beyond doubt, the Visitation, along with four panels - the Mount of Olives, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the latter signed „M S" and dated „1506" - held in the Christian Museum of Esztergom, as well as another panel depicting Christ's Nativity, owned by the parish church of Hontszentantal, once formed part of the same high altar. The Visitation and the Carrying of the Cross made up the movable, left wing of the altar. The painted panels - i.e. the paintings - were on the outside of the altar wings. In other words, they were visible when the altar was closed. In the original arrangement, the paintings now decorating the reverse made up the main view, i.e. they were visible when the altar was opened. The panel painting Visitation was acquired by the museum in 1902. There are no descriptions or photographs of its earlier location or condition. In fact, until 1953, when György Kákay Szabó started to restore the panel, we have no written documentation about the changes in its condition, nor about any restoration work carried out on. Our only source of information about this is provided by a few contemporary photographs. On the basis of these photos we can conclude that in 1902, at the time of purchasing the piece, the entire surface of the picture was not overpainted. Neither Herman Voss's photograph taken in 1907 1 , nor Kornél Divald's picture published in 1910 2 provide any evidence of such an overpaint. Furthermore, neither of the two men mentioned anything about the removal of such overpaint after the panel was taken to the museum. Partial overpaints, which seem more like repairs, can be detected on the photographs. From a stylistic point of view, these are different from the almost complete overpaints that originate from the baroque period of the Passion panels owned by the Christian Museum of Esztergom, as shown on photographs from the early twentieth century. This suggests that both the motifs and the period of their overpainting were different from those of the overpainting of the Visitation. Whether the Visitation had also been covered with an overpaint layer - which was perhaps removed before 1902 - is impossible to prove on the basis of photographic evidence. In the case of the panels owned by the Christian Museum, the overall overpaint layers were removed in 1915 by Sebestyén Endrődy. The uncovered Mediaeval layer of the Passion panels was noticeably less damaged and more complete, than the corresponding layer of the Visitation seemed to be on the photographs taken during its restoration in 1952. Following its first cleaning in 1910, „when layers of dust and soot which had adhered to the painting in the course of centuries" 3 was removed, the next serious restoration work took place in 1937. Then the thickness of the wooden panel was reduced, and it was strengthened by cradling. 4 It is a tremendous loss for science that neither a description nor a photograph was produced of the panel's reverse, which was „destroyed" in the process. Valuable information was irretrievably lost about the relief once forming part of the main view of the altarpiece, besides also losing direct evidence which would have enabled us to determine whether or not the Visitation and the Passion panels of Esztergom had once belonged to the same altarpiece. In 1952, the restorer György Kákay Szabó's work on the Visitation panel, was basically limited to the painted surface, thus giving the painting an aesthetic facelift. After injecting the lifted paint layer with Coletta, Kákay laid the paint with a spatula. He removed the earlier repairs and smaller overpaints added by other restorers. On the basis of the photographic documentation of the cleaning process we can conclude that these overpaints were found at the areas where the paint layer and the ground were almost completely missing - for example, on Elizabeth's red cape and Mary's blue cape, as well as on the bottom part of the pink dress - and
