Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)
Funeral Arts in the 19th Century
wider public seeking aesthetic pleasure but exclusively for the family in mourning. The last decades of the 19th century were to bring a radical change in this regard. Another much-employed early 19th century master of the carved figurái tombstone was Lőrinc Dunaiszky. Among his works was the Empire-style sarcophagus for the Orlandiny sepulchre. It is to Dunaiszky, too, that the only statue of Buda's pre-1848 funereal art that marks a grave to this day - the Pistori tomb from around 1828 — can be attributed. As Vilmos Dulitzky's sepulchre, this monument was first placed in Németvölgyi üt and then Kerepesi út Cemetery (K 17/1). Representing St. Barbara, patron saint of those in mortal agony and those dying a "worthy" Christian death, Dunaiszky's work is the last representative of a half-forgotten age in the history of Neo- Classicist sculpture. Even fewer of the masters who created the known funeral monuments in Váci út Cemetery can be identified. Here stood one of József Huber's works, the family tomb of the Vogels. It was possibly, although not necessarily, from here that Mrs. János Krajcsovits’s sepulchre was removed to Kerepesi út Cemetery (K 45). Erased by erosion beyond recognition as it is, the relief on the tomb is attributed by Albert Petrik to sculptor István Ferenczy. Although the pattern of composition does provide grounds for such a hypothesis, it is a known fact that only two sepulchral monuments can be attributed to Ferenczy beyond doubt, and both of these can be found inside churches: István Kultsár’s monument in the Pest Inner City Parish Church, and the stone marking István Marczibányi's grave in the crypt of what was first the Franciscan Brothers' and then the Elizabeth Sisters' Church in Fő utca. The oldest burial site in Budapest surviving largely intact in their original shape and location is a row of vaulted sepulchres built from the 1850s in a wall of Kerepesi út Cemetery. The oldest tombstones are located next to the wall sections near the main entrance. Although about a sixth of the nearly twelve hundred mural sepulchres has fallen victim to the process of planned elimination, acts of war, or natural decay, it can still be said that no other group of 19th century funeral monuments of comparable complexity and dimensions can be found anywhere in the Carpathian Basin. Despite its inestimable significance and the nominal protection that the assemblage enjoys as a major historic site, at least half of the monuments here are in very poor condition with several sepulchres actually crumbling away. And yet these mural vaults paint an exceptionally faithful picture of their age and its society 12
