H. Kolba Judit szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum Guide 2 - From the Foundation of the State until the Expulsion of the Ottomans - The history of Hungary in the 11th to 17th centuries (Budapest, 2005)

ROOM 3 - The Age of Sigismund of Luxembourg and János Hunyadi (first half of the 15th century) (Etele Kiss - Ágnes Ritoók)

17. Sigismund, king of Hungary (1387-1437) and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (1433-1437), copy of a painting by Albrecht Dürer, 1510-1513 of winged altars in the country, representing events in the lives of Jesus and of the Saints, with a special emphasis on the story of Christ's Passion. The exhibition shows several works of art connected with the veneration of the Holy Sacrament, the theme of the Man of Sorrows (Vir dolorum): the figure of Christ standing, dead as a man but living as God (Fig. 20). This became at the same time the pictorial representation of the most spectacular holiday of late mediaeval origin, Corpus Christi. At the Corpus Christi procession, all the nowevolving layers of society participated, from the king through the clergy to the laity, according to rank, craft, possibly to guild, together representing God's own people, pilgrims on the way to the kingdom of God, the celestial Jerusalem. In the centre was the consecrated Host, carried around in a richly decorated monstrance, which also made its appearance in Hungary during the reign of Sigismund. Hungarian goldsmith s art preserved its European ranking at this time, not least because of the precious metal at its disposal. The fate of the secular treasuries was, however, in most cases sad: items were given away or melted down, with the result that we know of their fabulous splendour only from descriptions. For their part, the ecclesiastical treasures had a better escape and were preserved through the centuries. For the rich architectural decoration of the gold and silver objects not only were the traditional methods used, but also various enamel techniques, among them the most famous, wired enamel, which appeared at this time following Northern Italian antecedents, and which was later regarded as having a special Hungarian character. In Hungary, engraving and sketch-like chasing gave way to the sculptural ornamentation of surfaces. On the Torna chalice (Fig. 22) and the Szendrő monstrance we see figures of Saints depicted using a chasing technique. Ecclesiastical textiles (paraments) made up an important part of mediaeval treasuries. In Hungary, apart from some royal gifts, only from the age of Sigismund onwards are full sets of liturgical vestments extant, the iconography of which complements the representations on the winged altars (Fig. 21). These chasubles were often re-cut later, with the result that their present, generally violin-shaped, form does not give an authentic picture of their one-time appearance. The emperor Frederick III was in the mid-