Rózsa György: The Palace of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

IV. The first floor

the members of the left-hand side group from among the leading personalities of the Reformation: Ferenc Dávid, János Erdősi Sylvester, István Gelei Katona, Péter Alvinczy and János Czeglédy. Lotz must have been faced with the greatest difficulty here, as hardly any reliable portraits of the above people have been left to us. Gábor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania, and Zsuzsanna Lórántffy are on the gallery with János Kemény and Gáspár Heltai behind them. The dominant figure on the right-hand side painting is Miklós Zrínyi, the poet and general. The poets János Gyöngyössy and László Listius can be recognized behind him. The Baroque literature of Hungary is represented by ruling prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, Kelemen Mikes, János Rimái and Ferenc Faludy on the right, and János Haller, Dávid Rozsnyai and Péter Ilosvai Selymes on the left. The painted gallery here, too, becomes populated. Mihály Sztáray holds a sealed diploma; Mária Széchy, the Venus of Murány, can be found by following the direction of Gyöngyössy's eye. Besides them, Sándor Felvinczy and Mrs. Lőrinc Pekri née Kata Szidónia Petrőczy, a poetess, are also on the gallery. Bálint Balassi, the outstanding Renaissance poet, moves down the stairs turning his back to Zrínyi; Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos, a bard of Hungary's 16th century history, is seated on the left of the platform. Károly Lotz broke with the traditions of monumental Baroque painting by omitting heavenly elements from his compositions. His ideal was Raffaello, who, on the Parnasse of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, portrayed historical figures in an idealized tableau, that is, he grouped them in a way they never appeared together. Lotz's commissioners expected him to introduce the outstanding figures of Hungary's cultural and literary history. This, especially in the medieval part, was practically impossible because of the lack of representative writerpersonalities, who could be portrayed by individual features. Therefore he chose to characterize each era by the ruling monarch, and placed the representatives of literature in his retinue. He had to depict the historical figures portrayed in his pictures as they were generally known at the end of the 19th century, not, however, in an epic form, in action, but statically, in a situation corresponding to their historical significance and personality. In the age of historism it was not inconsistent with the idealized concept of history for persons distant in space or time to appear together in the paintings (e.g. Coloman Beauclerc of the 12th, and Pelbárt Temesvári of the 15th century etc.). The relationship between the figures of the compositions is, as a consequence, merely formal. 24