Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - LÁSZLÓ TÖRÖK: After the Pharaos: Treasures of Coptic Art from Egyptian Collections

In recent years, the understanding of the history and culture of the Coptic period underwent radical changes and art historians began to make attempts at the replacement of the biased picture of Coptic culture. The Budapest exhibition, which consisted of eighty-six objects from the collection of the Coptic Museum., Cairo, thirty-five objects from the collection of the Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria, eight objects from the Alexandria National Museum,, Alexandria, a fürther sixty-eight objects from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest and twelve exhibits from the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, intended to illustrate the new appreciation of Coptic art as an organic part of Mediterranean Late Antique-Early Byzantine art. Another principal aim of the wide-ranging research work preceding the exhibition was to attempt to place the objects in a firm chronological and style-historical framework. Besides these comprehensive aims of the exhibition, the selection of the objects was also influenced by further considerations. Namely, the organisers intended to exhibit major works of art, which visualise the principal stylistic trends and the activity of important masters/ workshops in the period between the mid-third and seventh centuries A.D. They also intended to present paradigmatic examples for the relationship between Coptic Egypt and other great artistic centres of the contemporary world, as well as for the influence exerted by the production of elite workshops inside and out of Egypt on small provincial workshops. A further important aim was to place so far neglected, misinterpreted or forgotten objects of high artistic value in the centre of interest: more than half of the exhibits was selected from the storerooms of the lender museums, and a considerable part of the objects was unpublished. The principles according to which the objects were selected in Cairo, Alexandria and Budapest owe much to the previous research of Hjalmar Torp, Peter Grossmann, Hans-Georg Severin and László Török. The lessons drawn from the critical assessment of some important exhibitions of the last decades, such as the New York exhibition entitled Age of Spirituality, the 1989 exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA), the 1996 exhibition in Hamm, Germany, or the exhibition shown in 2000 in Paris and Agde in France, are equally important. The accent was laid on the selection of artworks produced for the elite in the best metropolitan workshops and of objects showing the impact of great art, though produced for less wealthy clients. The intricate relationship between quality, style and dating was not sufficiently explored in the earlier research and also remains unexplained in more recent works. The exhibition focussed therefore also on the transfor-