Kárpáti Zoltán - Liptay Éva - Varga Ágota szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 101. (Budapest, 2004)
ANNUAL REPORT 2004 - A 2004. ÉV - TEMPORARY EXEIIBITIONS - IDŐSZAKI KIÁLLÍTÁSOK - VILMOS TÁTRAI: From Raphael to Goya: Portraits from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest
painted by Gentile Bellini in 1500, and the latest was the 1904 portrait of Israel Jeral Zangwill by Solomon Joseph Solomon, which was displayed publicly for the first time one hundred years after being painted. The boundaries of time were drawn on the one side by the fact that the fifteenth-century beginnings of portraiture are not represented in our collections, and the other extremity was determined by our desire to ensure a measure of homogeneity to the exhibited material, keeping to the framework of the classical tradition of the portrait. Both for reasons of art historical importance and the represented level of quality, and in an effort to allure the audience, an admitted goal, the "big star names'" could not be absent: aside from the already mentioned Gentile Bellini, there were such artists as Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Dürer, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Moroni, El Greco, Frans Hals, Philippe de Champaigne, Rubens, Van Dyck, Reynolds and Goya, but independent of the greatness of the name, the sensitive visitors could discern the artistic quality, so that, for instance, the enthralling painting and evocative power of the soul of the Portrait of a Lady by the not at all famous Willem Drost was recognised as a creation approaching the heights of Rembrandt. The individual "chapters" of the exhibition fixed a spotlight on the various aspects of portrait painting. The two donor portraits suggested the sacred antecedents of the portrait as autonomous genre. The works classified under the title The Portrait of the Individual directed attention to the shifts and expansion of the range of means of expression, and to the process by which the painter reached from the mask to the face, from the monument to the living being, from the exterior of the model to his/her soul and personality. The Head Studies allowed a glimpse into the atelier of the portrait painter. The Court Portraits proffered a picture first and foremost of the artistic methods and artifice of adulation, glorification and idealisation (fig. 64). The Allegorical Portraits, or "portraits historiés", provided an idea of a particular domain of heroisation and role-playing. The Representatives of Craft are naturally burghers, and their portraits also belong to the bourgeois branch of the genre. Attentive viewers of Self Portraits and Artist Portraits could obtain quite interesting information on the transformations of the social rank, self-consciousness and self-image of the artist. In the chapter devoted to Ideals of Feminine Beauty, understandably, Giorgionism and its successors were given the position of honour, but a number of enigmatic Mannerist compositions also enriched the scope. Lovers and Married Couples again simply documented the era, taste, morals, social hierarchy, reality and its celestial alter ego all at once. The sociological and psychological content of the Family Portraits was presented quite legibly in its Dutch, Flemish and French examples, and the Child Portraits were also especially telling in the same sphere. Genre Portraits were represented by one seventeenth century and four eighteenth century compositions, indicating just when the blending of the two genres became fashionable among the collectors' circles. The benefit of the exhibition to the lending museum and the attraction on the part of the borrowing institution were increased by the presentation of a number of recently acquired and even more freshly restored paintings. As a part of the preparations for the show, the complete restoration of thirteen paintings was accomplished. Among the
