Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - ANNA JÁVOR: Pictures within Pictures: The Artist and the Public over Five Centuries of Graphic Art from Burgkmair to Picasso

cated to Saint Luke painting the Virgin Mary. The next chapter, for me the most fascinating one, introduced academies. The real "picture within a picture" representations can be found in the rich selection of artists' portraits and depictions of studios, where the modern legends about artists end with Picasso's illustrations to Balzac, to be followed by the antiquarian monkey with his disciples bustling like creative artists. The artist's studio, art expertise and exhibition, with the best pieces of the collection, among them the famous Watteau composition, featured also on the cover of the catalogue, the signboard of Gersaint and the watercolours of Gyula Háry, showing the hall of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the predecessor of the Museum of Fine Arts, the National Picture Gallery. There are some peculiar pictures about pictures: a copperplate quodlibet and Hogarth's two cynical sheets and one pessimistic one to close the catalogue. The exhibition was enriched with some paintings from the Old Masters' Gallery as well, to signal that the importance of the selected topics in art history reaches well beyond the realm of prints and drawings. Within the Museum's Collection of Prints and Drawings, the reproduced printed material, alongside the magnificent drawings, is also an inexhaustible treasury

—far more significant than just the research field of preliminary studies. The department periodically sets on display these works within thematic selections, envisaging that sort of artistic universality, the contemplation of which

—through original artworks

— is still granted to only a small segment of the public. This tradition reaches back to 77 I AN BAPTIST COLLAERT AFTER STRADANUS. THE INTENTION OF OIL TAINTING. BUDAPEST, MUSEUM OF FINE ART