Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 31. (Budapest, 2017)

Ildikó PANDUR: Restoration of Metalwork from the Esterházy Treasury in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts: Past, Present and Future

ury, because not all of the artworks came to Hungary in 1919. Some items that remained in Forchtenstein are still on display there, including many very fragile artworks that would be difficult to transport. The first time the treasures held in Budapest— deemed state property since 1949—were put on display alongside some from Forchtenstein was at an exhibition in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, held jointly with the Esterházy Privatstiftung, in 2006. The National Museum was also represented there, because its Historical Department has held the medals from the treasury, together with some personal heirlooms, rosaries, etc., since 1962.13

The latest detailed publications of items from the treasury are a series of Museum of Applied Arts’ catalogues called Thesaurus Domus Esterhazyanae. Volume I has entries on 170 pieces of metalwork, and volume II covers 68 textile items.14 Volume III, which will cover the severely damaged and completely destroyed pieces, is still in preparation.

The treasury’s stormy twentieth-century history and its continuing effects are the subject of a book by Hilda Horváth, published in 2014.15 As well as exploring the exhibitions that have featured items from the Esterházy Treasury, the book gives an extensive—several page long—chronological list of restorations and the restorers responsible for them.

Every department of the Museum of Applied Arts is involved in safeguarding and restoring pieces from the Esterházy treasury. It is a unique collection that includes European ceramics, glassware and silver furniture in addition to metalwork and textiles. This broad range has caused the process of restoring the Esterházy artworks to be intertwined with the history of

the museum’s restoration workshops. Ever since they were delivered to the museum, the Esterházy treasures have constantly stimulated the establishment and modernization of the workshops.

A major contribution to compiling this story was the large-scale restorer exhibition held in the Museum of Applied Arts in 2008, curated by Katalin E. Nagy, the head of the Textile Restoration Workshop at the time. This display of sixty restored artworks, many of them from the Esterházy treasury, the work of thirty-two restorers, conveyed very clearly the responsibility attaching to this profession, and how much knowledge, skill, historical background, creativity, artistic sense and not least good taste it demands, combined of course with artistic humility, self-restraint and respect for the original makers of the objects. The exhibition prompted the collection departments to initiate thorough research into the past of their own areas and the restoration profession as a whole.16

Although restoration only started to take shape as a separate profession in Hungary in the 1940s, together with the organisation of museums and historic monument preservation on a national scale, its development received a considerable impulse after the war. Restorers had a plentiful supply of war-damaged artworks, ‘raw material’ of the first order, of which the treasures retrieved from the bombed out Esterházy palace in Tárnok Street constitute the prime example.

Of the nearly 450 items pulled out from under the ruins in 1949,17 about 330 have been identified to some degree. Several pieces never came to light or were destroyed, and quite a few were unidentifia- bly mixed up in the mass. The items were packed separately in paper and placed in

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