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

Kerepesi út Cemetery at the Turn of the 20th Century

and which was among the most valuable of the mural vaults that perished in Kerepesi út Cemetery.

The most prestigious funeral commissions were made for sculptures to be erected in the gubernatorial vaults. Archduke Joseph Charles Louis commissioned Alajos Hauszmann to rebuild the vault and György Zala to design the sepulchre of Palatine Joseph. Interior decorations made in the tradition of the Medici sepulchre in Florence and three large-scale sculptural works came into being in the course of the reconstruction. In the centre of the vault was placed the genuflecting figure of Palatine Joseph protecting the Hungarian crown. Made by Zala, too, was the sarcophagus of Joseph Charles Louis and his wife representing, in medieval fashion, the decedents in a supine position. A work related to that is the single-figure sarcophagus of Archduke Louis Philip by Alajos Stróbl. (On account of the formal analogy, the sepulchre of Béla 111 and his wife made by Ferenc Mikola and placed in the Matthias Church in 1898 should also be mentioned here.)

Deserving mention among the significant works from the period around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are pieces made by Ede Kallós. His contemporaries ranked Kallós with Donáth as one of the most characteristic funeral sculptors of the period. The formal qualities of his works do assign Kallós a place among the important masters of the age, but his artistic idiom is less unmistakably autonomous than Donáth’s. One of his finest works is the tomb of Ferenc Erkel from 1904 (K 29) topped with the statue of a singing woman, a relief of lyrical beauty, and the figure of a sphinx. The architectural component of the Erkel Monument was designed by Géza Márkus, who collaborated with Kallós on the 1905 sepulchre of János Jankó, too (K 11). The architecture of the Minich sepulchre from 1900 is the work of Gyula Kosztolányi Kann (K 19). The best-known funeral work of Ede Kallós's is over Dániel Irányi's grave (K 29); the piece was such a success that a replica was set up as a public monument (as the first work in that genre by Kallós). The popularity of the work was mainly due to the fact that the mournful figure of Hungary is represented in national costumes rather than the usual armoury. The architectural structure of the Irinyi tomb was designed by Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor, with whom Kallós jointly entered the tender competition for the Kossuth Mausoleum, a project rife with corruption. Kallós and his associates' designs were found to be the best by the jury.

Unveiled in 1902, Sándor Kozma's funeral monument is another of Kallós's better-known works (K 29/2). The piece features Justice's herm and the central

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