Majorossy Judit: Egy történelmi gyilkosság margójára. Merániai Gertrúd emlékezete, 1213 - 2013. Tanulmánykötet - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, A. sorozat: Monográfiák 2. (Szentendre, 2014)
VI. English Summaries
To the Margin of a Historical Murder — English Summaries Cray (1385-1475) became key figures of politics at the Burgundian court, but a number of the family members filled high political and ecclesiastical offices. By the 1500s the family became one of the most powerful families of the Low Countries. As a chief tutor and confidant of the later Emperor Charles V Guillaume II de Croy, Lord of Chiévres (1458-1521) was instrumental in transmitting the heritage of the Burgundian princes to the young Habsburg successor. His service was rewarded by the emperor with awarding the title of Marquis of Aarschot to him first, and in 1532 elevating his descendant to the title Duke of Aarschot. Importantly for the present subject, the Croy family claimed descent from the illustrious Hungarian royal house of Árpád, who ruled the kingdom up to 1301. Several members of this dynasty were canonized or beatified by the Holy Roman Church, one of them being Elizabeth of Hungary (Heilige Elisabeth von Thüringen). In this article a number of late medieval and early modern sources were investigated by the author from different genres and media — for example, genealogies, a prose romance, dramas, religious tractates, and portraits — mostly commissioned by, or for different members of the Croy family, treating the topos of the Arpádian descent, or the legendary founder of the dynasty, Marcus of Croy. By analysing the context in which the topos is presented and the selection of elements of Hungarian history used, I attempt to reconstruct the - mostly propagandistic - function of the artefacts in the dynastic display from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. One of my points of interest is how the Croy family used the topos to position themselves in relation to the rulers in the Low Countries, the dukes of Brabant, the House of Burgundy and the House of Habsburg. Though it is too early to draw in-depth conclusions, it can be stated that in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the symbolic weight of the royal house of Árpád seems to be used as reinforcement for the realisation of the Croy dynastic ambitions. With the religious controversies of the late sixteenth century and the Eighty Years’War (1568-1648), the emphasis shifts to underpinning the idea of the Croys as the defenders of the true faith, Catholicism, by relating them to the holy members of the house of Árpád. Beatrix Basics Representations of Gertrud of Andechs-Meran in the Nineteenth Century. Stage Scenes and Illustrations The first version of the drama of József Katona (1791-1830), the first Bánk bán was published in 1814, the second one in 1820. Beside Hungarian chronicles, different Italian, German, and Austrian literary sources were used when forming the play. The opera, based on the drama was composed by Ferenc Erkel (1810—1893) and first put on stage in 1861. Hungarian illustrated fashion magazines published from the 1820s had colour illustrations as a supplement for the subscribers. It was the Honművész that first supplemented stage scenes as illustrations. The drawings of Miklós Barabás (1810-1898), one among the most outstanding painters and graphic artists of the nineteenth century, were published in these magazines as lithograph illustrations. The Hungarian Theatre in Pest was opened in 1837. Plays, literature and fine art were closely connected, as it was proven by the complex work of playwrights and painters. Costumes were formed on the basis of the fashion of the preceeding two centuries, in the style of the so-called Hungarian gala dress. The great period of magazine illustrations were the two decades between 1840 and 1860. The illustrations were basically graphic works, and only a few examples of oil paintings are known. Katona’s drama was put on stage in 1839 in the Pest Hungarian Theatre. Its hero was portrayed on the graphic illustration following the oriental taste of the period. Certain pieces of the male costumes go back to the fashion represented on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century oil paintings of the so-called ancestors’galleries. Female stage fashion was much more connected to and influenced by the biedermeier taste of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Beside the stage scenes of Miklós Barabás, which turned into a type of genre-piece by the late 1850s, more detailed, story-telling versions of the illustrations were also spread. These compositions got nearer step-by-step to complex stagescene illustrations representing the story of the play. It was Lipót Pálffy Daun (1834-1884), born to an aristocratic family, an ardent fan and follower of Count István Széchenyi and the Hungarian affairs, who made a specific series of water colours representing the figures and costumes of the Katona drama. His Bánk Bán album was finished in 1881, and it was not just a compilation of costume plans and set to Ferenc Erkel’s opera, but the twenty eight water colour pieces worked as independent historical representations. 319
