Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 104. (Budapest, 2006)
ZOLTÁN KOVÁCS: "The Witty Pieter Quast": The Works of an Amsterdam Master in Hungary Then and Now
alongside them, exaggerated and brightly illuminated, serves to symbolically suggest not only his own destiny, but the war as a whole. This picture outstanding both in dimension and artistic quality in the oeuvre of Pieter Quast is in no way inferior to the standard of the works of Palamedesz, who was considered a specialist of the genre (fig. 8). 37 As we can also observe in the works of Palamedesz produced after 1635, the composition is built up from groups that can be easily separated, which move PALAMEDES PAI AMEDESZ. CAVALRY SKIRMISH. FOREIGN PRIVATE COLLECTION not only in the plane, but also in threedimensional space, according to some sort of scheme built up from triangles. 38 The emphasis is on the dramatic character of the battle, which first and foremost gives voice to the close placement and daring portrayal of the wounded soldier and the horse. The artist reduced the landscape elements of the composition to the minimum, with these serving only to indicate the location of the battle. Bredius knew of only two battle scenes by Quast, and in the early twentieth century, they were both preserved in Saint Petersburg, in the collections of Russian aristocrats. According to Bredius's description, the battle scene in the Semionov Collection was a cavalry battle painted in the style of Jan Martsen de Jonge, which certainly cannot be the same as the Budapest painting. 39 All he knew about the other work, which w r as preserved in the collection of Prince Kudachev, was that it was large-size, and it was likewise a battle scene on horseback. On the basis of information available, unfortunately we cannot establish whether this was one and the same as the painting in Hungary, or not. In the former Budapest collection of professor Ödön Faragó, there was a painting of Quast, which illustrates a newer side of his art. The small-scale panel was given the title Night Round, when following the death of the owner, his estate was put on auction in 1935 at the Ernst Museum (fig. 9). 4<) The title presumably misinterprets the portrayal, as this is an adaptation of the charlatan theme of great tradition, which is not even extremely novel. The main figure of the scene set in a barber-doctor workshop, or even a tavern (?) is a wounded man, whom the bearded, elderly doctor is trying to ctire. The contorted face of the wounded discloses that he must
