Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

he earned his reputation as the founder of Hungary's institutional monuments protection. He first became interested in archaeology due to the antique collection of an Eperjes lawyer, Gábor Fejérváry. Ferenc Pulszky, Henszlmann's fellow-student and "close friend” at the College of Eperjes who was to become the director of the National Museum, remembered the college as a place where nobody spoke Hungarian as a mother tongue and where Henszlmann himself mastered the language in which he would publish his copious and varied works.

In 1841, a few years after graduation, at the early age of 28, Henszlmann was made associate member of the Academy on account of his work Paralleli between Ancient and Modem Arti&tic Ideái and Educational Practiced, with Special Regard to Artiitic Development in Hungary. At least as important as that was his study entitled On the Old German-Style Churched in the City of Kana, in which he virtually "discovered” the ogival, or Gothic, style. An essential aspect of his life's work was the assessment and comparative analysis of some very important architectural monuments in Hungary (Kassa, Zsámbék, Pannonhalma, the Pauline Monastery of Budaszentlőrinc, etc.) and the conclusions he drew from these analyses regarding certain architectonic proportions. As he concludes in his memoirs, "...a major flaw of modern constructions is their failure to observe the poise for which the buildings of old are so much admired.”

In 1848 he worked in Vienna as drafter and press secretary to Minister Pál Esterházy and Under-Secretary Pál Szontágh, for which he was later imprisoned for eight months. After his years of emigration in London and Paris he returned to Hungary in i860. During his stay abroad he had acquired a fine collection of paintings and prints (which he later donated to the Museum of Kassa). He had a keen eye for spotting and purchasing drawings by Dürer, whose Hungarian origins he thought, according to contemporary reports, should be commemorated by the naming of a Hungarian street for the great Renaissance master.

He also wrote literary and general criticism. In that capacity he edited and contributed to the journal Vierteljahreachri^t von u. für Ungarn and, in conjunction with Ferenc Toldy and János Erdélyi, edited and published the Review of Hungarian Letten.

In 1862 he made a journey with Ferenc Kubinyi and Arnold Ipolyi to Transylvania and Constantinople, where, in the Sultan's Court, he discovered copies of King Matthias’s famous books, the "Corvinas”, that had been stolen by the country's Ottoman occupiers from Hungary. He directed successful archaeological

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