Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)

JÚLIA TÁTRAI AND LÁSZLO LENGYEL: Archduke Albert († 1621) on the Catafalque: A Picture of Old-New Acquisition

ly receding from the temples

—we may suppose that the donátor was Leonard Lessius (Brecht, 1554—Leuven, 1623) a Jesuit theologian (fig. 8). This Flemish scholar, who was a professor and a respected authority at the Jesuit college in Leuven, was among the closest advisors of the archducal couple.

18 His works

—-one of which was translated into Hungarian

—made him famous throughout Europe and dealt not only with theological issues but also with those pertaining to law and economic ethics. He dedicated his most famous work, first published in 1605 and entitled De justifia et jure, to Archduke Albert, who used it as a kind of guidebook, keeping it on his desk at all times.

39 The facial features of the individual depicted in the Budapest picture not only resemble those of Lessius, of whom several painted and engraved portraits have survived,

40 but his age also tallies with that of Lessius, who was sixty-seven in 1621. If Lessius is the donátor represented on our picture, the further question to be answered is what the "fundatoris nostri" denomination refers to. As mentioned earlier, Lessius was a theology professor in Leuven, where Albert's name is linked to the setting down of the new rules of university education to ensure Jesuit orthodoxy. It is conceivable that the part of the inscription dubbing Albert as "our founder" is an allusion to his introduction of these rules.

41 THE ISSUE OF AUTHORSHIP The last line of the bottom inscription in the painting begins with the name "C. Mallery", based on which the work was mentioned in the 1923 catalogue of the Zichy Collection as one by Karel van Mallery with a question mark. To reiterate, all attempts to decipher the abbreviations in the rest of the caption have met with failure, although they obviously hold the key to the attribution. Their deciphering would reveal what relation the "C. Mallery" in question has to the picture. According to the authors of the Zichy catalogue, Karel van Mallery was a "painter and engraver", who "mainly painted history paintings but also traded in art". The question is what the basis of their assertions was since there is no written source mentioning Mallery as a painter and to this day not a single painting can be attributed to him. According to the biographical data currently available, Karel van Mallery (1571-after 1635) was a draughtsman, engraver and art dealer in prints from Antwerp, who began his career from 1585 as a pupil of Philip Galle. Three years later he married Gable's daughter, Catharina, and then worked in Rome between 1 595 and 1597. From 1597 he was a member and from 1620-1621 the dean of the guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp. In 1601 he was given municipal citizenship in Paris and for five to six years worked concurrently for publishers in Antwerp and Paris before finally returning to his native town. He principally made small-scale engravings