Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)

Funeral Arts in the 19th Century

tery and then, after that was also eliminated, on to Kerepesi út Cemetery. The Döbrentei (K 17/1) and the Grigely (K 17/1) sepulchres are examples of the latter category. Many of the relocated tombstones, especially those in the section where the heroes of the 1848 War of Independence lie buried (K 31/2), are carved into reused headstones. Retaining their original shape, these stones feature inscriptions of a later date.

Within the group of nineteenth-century sepulchres is the small but distinct category of figurái monuments. A major representative of funeral sculpture was József Thimi's grave marker carved in 1811 into sandstone together with a six-metre tall crucifix carved into red marble and set up behind the tomb in the Kiscelli (Újlaki) Cemetery. The latter was made for all the dead interred in the cemetery as a communal site of mourning and was transferred to a landscaped section of Kecske utca in Óbuda where it stands since 1932. Arnold Schoen believes the two pieces to be the work of Hermann Witwer, a sculptor from Lemberg, but more recent literature attributes the cross to a Buda-based master, Frigyes Held. The other surviving communal site of mourning comes from the Tabán Cemetery and can now be seen in a yard behind the Parish Church of Újlak. Erected by Pál Swirak, the funeral cross bears the chronogram marking the date it was set up (1833).

Tombstones were usually left unsigned by the maker. One exception was József Huber. He mostly took commissions for the old cemetery of Óbuda. Examples of Huber's prolific work include the Meixner Tomb (in Kiscell Cemetery) made in 1824 and featuring the figure of a genius holding a torch, or the sepulchre of Dániel Siebenrock carved in 1832 (for the cemetery in Kórház utca) decorated with an armoured knight. Another monument originally set up in the Kiscell Cemetery and later transferred to the Víziváros Civilian Cemetery was the tomb, made in 1832, of Karolina Schmidt. For this Huber sculpted a melancholy female figure, one of the basic motifs of the age’s funeral symbolism. Huber's most remarkable work, Fülöp Fleschner's tomb made in 1828, used to stand in Víziváros Military Cemetery. Unlike most of Hubner's other works, this one did not feature a classical allegory, but the popular figure of contemporaneous military funereal art: a resting lion guarding over a shield. So many people visited the sepulchre after its consecration that the family lodged a complaint about the multitudes. The significance of the incident is that the arguments brought by the family were grounded in a more archaic concept of funereal art in which a sepulchre was not meant for the

11