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

The artistic value of funeral monuments is often of a lesser significance than the historical evidence they bear as visual markers of their time and its culture. For that reason, the topic of funeral practices, similarly to that of public monuments, has as much relevance to historiography and cultural history as it does to art history. A sepulchral monument can have great documentary value even if its importance as an object of art is marginal. Another reason why this art form cannot be assessed with aesthetic categories alone is that customers can exert a great influence to achieve ostentatious execution, and it is often the family or the friends of the deceased who select the artist.

This brief survey cannot possibly aim at a comprehensive introduction of all the monuments of Flungary's funereal art to be found in Budapest. The emphasis thus falls on sepulchres of architectural, sculptural or cultural significance of the 19th and 20th centuries, a fact explained by the historical makeup of Budapest's existing cemeteries. For obvious reasons, not even that period can be fully covered by introducing every important monument; it is thus only selections from thousands of potentially noteworthy pieces that are offered below. No mention is made here of sepulchral monuments, mostly held in museums today, from earlier centuries, and 19th or 20th century gravestones inside churches are introduced very briefly. Although coming under the heading of funereal art in its broadest sense, symbols, escutcheons, verse and prose epitaphs are not discussed at all. Due to constraints of space, no detailed iconographic analyses can be offered either. Most importantly, it is the sepulchres and their makers and not the identity, occupations or careers of the dead lying buried under these monuments that this book undertakes to introduce.

In a discussion of funereal art, very frequent mention is to be made of Budapest's two major burial sites: the cemeteries in Farkasrét and Kerepesi út. For that reason, the names of these cemeteries are given wherever possible as (F) or (K). The initial letter is followed by a section number — e. g. (F 25) - meant to facilitate the location of individual sepulchres. Only the current, as opposed to any former, site of any given sepulchre is given here, and eliminated or stolen monuments are not identified by place at all as the missing object is no longer visible. Names of less frequently mentioned cemeteries are given in full without section numbers.

Before the chronological discussion of this book’s topic, a short survey of the existing literature on the funereal art of Budapest’s cemeteries will be of help.

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