Benkő Andrea: A Guide to Petőfi Literary Museum (Budapest, 2009)
The History of the Palace
THE HISTORY OF THE PALACE The Balcony Hall made of domestic materials at their balls. Young people marched with torches in celebration of the two sisters, and Sándor Petőfi wrote them poetry. In 1832, György Károlyi commenced large-scale reconstruction work. The widely travelled aristocrat wanted to embellish the Palace in a new style based on his own experiences abroad. The work was begun by Anton Pius Riegel, an architect from Vienna, who designed the architecture of the main front in the neoclassical 3-6-1 -6-3 axle rhythm. The task was completed by Henrich Koch (1781-1861), who had graduated from the Academy of Vienna and worked in Vienna (e.g. the Dietrichstein Palace), in Bohemia (the Kinsky Villa in Prague) and in Hungary. Koch completely transformed the middle part of the Palace. The Library was situated above the elongated section of the gateway. The three-flight glass-roofed main staircase and the two service staircases were pulled down and rebuilt on twice as large an area. The tympanic windows were simplified and made flush with the wall on the main front. In the spirit of Classicism, the ornaments were replaced by simplicity and the dignity of proportion. The decoration of the Ceremonial Hall and the salons was carried out in 1839-1840. Craftsmen created the exquisite work of contractors in Vienna, while some of the materials for the wall hangings, curtains and carpets were brought from France. In 1835, the supervision of the construction work was taken over by Mihály Pollack (1773-1855), a master of Hungarian neoclassical architecture. He worked on the Palace until the 1840s, while only a few streets away his main work, the Hungarian National Museum, was taking shape. The ceremonial 'house-warming' took place in 1841. The Palace was renowned for its splendid evening 8
