Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - ZOLTÁN KÁRPÁTI: On the Jubilee Album
which for the first time represented a departure from the tradition adhered to by the previous publications. In a continuous chronology the album shows sculptures, reliefs, mosaics, altars, panel paintings, pictures, papyruses, drawings and prints side by side. It emphasises not only the unity and the coherence of the collections, but also reveals the similarities shared by various fields of the arts, regions and nations, and moreover, sheds light upon parallel as well as diverging artistic ambitions. The compilation contains pieces ranging from a Cycladic idol of the Bronze Age to the graphics of a Russian contemporary artist, Ilya Kabakow. This clearly demonstrates the museum's open approach to contemporary art and the importance of acquiring new material. Although these 162 works cannot represent the more than one hundred thousand piece collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in its entirety, the objective was nevertheless for the album to reflect the importance and special character of certain collections, albeit in proportion to their size. Thus from the smaller, but continuously growing Collection of Classical Antiquities two, new acquisitions could also be presented: a Roman marble relief, purchased in 2000, depicting a festive procession from the first century, while the other new work acquired in 2005 (but which turned up in Tunisia in the middle of the last century), is a Roman mosaic from the third century, representing Orpheus. The Collection of Egyptian Art, which is also moderate in regard to quantity, was represented by emblematic pieces such as the limestone Portrait of a Prince, and the bronze Apis Bull and Cat. However, another newly purchased (1996) accession, the Magic Tablet, which has already been published in this journal, also found its way into this selection. 1 Besides the well-known Italian and Spanish masterpieces of Raffaello, Giorgione, Correggio, Veronese, El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, etc., the French, Dutch, Flemish as well as the rarely reproduced, but important German and Austrian paintings of the Old /Master's Gallery were also included in the album. In addition to the drawings in the Collection of Prints and Drawings such artists as Leonardo, Parmigianino, Guido Reni, Dürer, Jan Brueghel, Rembrandt, Daumier, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, some etchings and engrawings as well as pieces in other graphic techniques, demonstrating the importance of the Collection of Prints, were also presented for the first time in the history of similar albums. The Collection of Sculptures before 1800, with its approximately 600 pieces, was represented by, among many others, the world famous bronze rider linked to Leonardo, Verrocchio's recently restored terracotta Christ, Andrea Riccio's and Alessandro Algardi's small bronzes, and finally Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's rather strange character head. The nineteenth century French works of the Modern Collection, the paintings of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and the sculpture of Rodin were supplemented by pieces made by Arnold
