Budapest, 1946. (2. évfolyam)

11. szám - BENEDEK ANDRÁS: Színházi esték

BUDAPEST ILLUSTRATED HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL REVIEW PUBLISHED BY THE CITY OF BUDAPEST THE INNER CITY CHURCH IN PEST Pest, on the left-hand side of the Danube, can boast of no more important and valuable artistic monument than the so-called Church of the Inner City with its varying, super-imposed styles deriving from different architectural periods and thus reflecting not only the history of the church itself but also, in a wider sense, the artistic development of the country as a whole. The church was originally erected on the site of the praetorium of Contraaquincum which formed a part of the fortifications facing the Roman limes on the Buda side. The Roman castellum, still extant when the Magyars occupied the country, was seized by Bulgar Ishmaelites and used by them in the first centuries of the Arpadian era. As the Bulgare had by then embraced Christianity and as St. Stephen had already recognized Pest as a town by the grant of various privileges, there is no doubt that there was a church here in the eleventh century, a fact borne out by the relics of the time of the Conquest found in the burial ground surrounding the church. Our oldest architectural remains date from the end of the twelfth century and reveal classical traces of the Romanesque style which Hungary developed mostly under western influences. The church of this period was three-aisled, built in the form of a basilika, with a semi-circular sacristy and a double-fronted tower. Already its importance had outgrown the confines of the township, as is proved by the fact that it was the scene of the betrothal of St. Elizabeth of the House of Árpád with Count Louis of Thuringia, as well as of many important State functions. At the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the church was rebuilt in the Gothic style but with a partial utilization of the old walls. The nave and sacristy were lengthened and the foundations altered to form a peristyle and a passage behind the altar and probably a single-fronted tower. As valuable relics from the time of Sigismund may be mentioned the fragments of the old, separate hexagonal Gothic sacristy containing mural paintings of male and female saints painted under Italian influence by artists of the end of the fourteenth century. The Gothic niches, with seating accomodation, built into the walls of the sacristy and embellished with firstrate mural paintings representing scenes from the Passion, also date from the time of Sigismund (beginning of fifteenth century). In the reign of Matthias Corvinus (second half of fifteenth century) a row of chapels was added to the aisle and the door-frames of the side entrances were enriched with exquisitely carved late Gothic motifs of which oidy fragments have been preserved. The Remaissance style found its purest expression in the two wall tabernacles dating from the year 1507, preesrved unscathed, and in the fragments of the red marble high altar. The Turkish occupation, which paralysed the life of the entire country, brought destruction and decay also to the church. The liberation (1686) found it in ruins. The reconstruction took place in the Baroque period, and in keeping with the economic conditions and art standards of the day, contributed little of artistic value to the building. The old foundations and the Gothic sacristy were retained but the vaulted roof of the nave was re-constructed and two towers of simple masonry were added to the front elevation. The interior arrangements likewise failed to rise above mediocrity ; only here and there do we meet with the work of a more particular and gifted master craftsman, as was, for instance, the sculptor of the Calvary altar dating from 1762. The nineteenth century revivals of by-gone styles are all to be found in this church. Thus the tomb of Kulcsár, (1832) by Stephen Ferenczy, is in the neo-classic style, the pulpit (1808) in the neo-Gothic, while the stained-glass windows, dating from the end of the last century and destroyed during the recent siege, reflect the romantic style. The restoration works begun in 1930 and continued almost without interruption ever since, have freed the church from the Baroque and nineteenth century additions and reconstructions and have revealed fragments of its pristine beauties. The previous Romanesque and Gothic foundations have been brought to light by the spade. The question of further restoration works and the pulling down and re-building of the inartistic nave and front forms one of the burning problems of the Municipality as patron of the church. In all probability the solution will tend towards the preservation of the edifice as it stands, in the same way as, in the first years of the twentieth century, it escaped being pulled down altogether when the construction of the adjacent Elizabeth Bridge seemed to render this desirable. It is by now a generally accepted fact that the Church of the Inner City is one of Budapest's oldest and most valuable artistic relics, which may yet be found to harbour many unrevealed treasures if the work of restoration is continued. T . 1 * n-i- 1 -Laszlo rahnkas PESTALOZZI AND THE NURSERY SCHOOL NAMED "CHERUB'S GARDEN" IN BUDA The civilized world, recovering its poise after the shocks and dislocations of the recent war. has been remembering Henry Pestalozzi on the occasion of the rj)ietuNo -Oil rpahiii(tg,s HOFFMANN FEREHC BUDAPEST, IV., GERLÓCZY-UTCA 5 two hundredth anniversary of his birth. The child who first saw the light in the dark, sunless room of a house in the Hirschengraben, a narrow side-street of Zürich, has long been the property of the whole civilized world. It is only natural that we should be particulary interested in his links with Hungary, which have been brought to light by the painstaking research of his biographers so that we have only to dip into a book or two to find all we want on this score. Henrv Pestalozzi's representative in Hungary was that Countess Theresa Brunswick whom some of Beethoven's biographers hold to have been the great musician's famous »unsterbliche Geliebte«. Theresa Brunswick was thirty-three years old when she met Pestalozzi in Switzerland. (Her friendship with Beethoven began in her twentieth year.) The young, wealthy, carefully educated Countess was in every sense a genuine child of her age. The first of her manifold gifts to reveal itself was the musical, and it brought her Beethoven as a teacher. Later her thirst for knowledge extended to many different fields. She developed a passion for literature, essaying her hand at writing verses herself, mostly in the German language ; she also took up natural history, and collected plants and GA LLWÍTZ The oldest shop in Budapest for smoking articles IV., PÁRISI-UTCA 9 - IV., KÍGYÓ-UTCA 4 The best lighters, pipes, ivory w carvings and gifts w 433