Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 13. (Budapest, 1993)

ZLINSZKYNÉ STERNEGG Mária: Emlékmeghatározások

woodcuts have remained covered, thus any possible initials or markings could have persisted unnoticed. A chest from 1701 In 1892, the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts bought three pieces of furniture, among them a Tirolean chest (see pict.5) from Anton Girtlcr of Sterzing, Tirol.

8 The chest shows some typical characteristics that provide all the necessary information as to its origin.

9 The yellow pine chest is decorated with flat carving, with traits of red and black paint. It rests on a detachable plinth. The corners of the chest and the plinth are fastened by swallow-tail joints, while the bottom is fixed by wooden nails. The top is enframed by an egg-and-dart lathe with jointed edges. It is also decorated with flat carving in profiled lathe frames or over an indented base. Inside, there is a deep compartment on the left, which lacks its folding top. The back has five small compartments in a covered shelf called "gallery"; their brown front is decorated with seven baluster-segments, painted in red. The top of the chest opens on two wrought-iron bands, painted in red lead. The keyhole shield, the padlock with side spring and the wrought-iron handles on the sides show traces of red paint. The front of the chest is divided into three narrow and two broad standing fields by corniche frames. Both in the columned arches and in the rectangular fields there are arabesque-like ornaments carved in flat relief. The sides -and the top - show a repetition of a huge scrolling mountwork called "rollwork" between stripes of adjoining semicircles. The plinth is cut in ogee shape on the sides and in a wavy line at the front; the frieze is decorated with adjoining semicircles. The feet repeat the "Rollwerk" of the top and sides. The date 1701 is carved in the arhces of the arcades. Companion pieces of the chest of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts described above are the chests from Enncberg in the collection of the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck. One of them - according to Colleselli - was made in 1772 (see pict.6)

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, while the other is carved with the date 1734 (see pict.)

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. These chests were also made of yellow pine, painted in red against a black base, and decorated with arabesques and "Rollwcrk" identical with the ornaments of the Budapest chest. Enncberg is in Tirol, at the south of Pustertal, a large, 100-km-long valley in the Eastern Alps, lying between Brixen and Licnz, with several subvallcys opening into the Alps. Perhaps the most important one among these is the southern Enncberg or Enncbcrgcr Tal, near St. Lorcnzcn. Its centre is St. Vigil. The furniture style of the valleys in the Alps are quite different from each other, yet the Enncberg chests have a distinctive place in Rhaeto-Romanic folk art. "This is due to the unconventional ornaments over an indented base, which fill both the rectangular and the arched fields up to the rim. The motifs carved in flat relief were borrowed from Late Renaissance intarsia art; the dark shades of lazure colours (i.e. black or purple-blue), the greens and reds are added mainly to highlight the effect of the decoration."

12 On the chest in the collection of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts the date 1701 appears in the arches, which is the usual place of dating. Contacting the Museum of Tirolean Folk Art in Innsbruck I learned that after the revision of one of their Enncberg chests, they found that third figure of the 1772 date can cither be 5 or