Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - AXEL VÉCSEY: El Greco, Velázquez, Goya: Five Centuries of Spanish Masterpieces
3 INTERIOR VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION Dresden presentation provided an exceptional opportunity to mount an exhibition that would explore the character and development of Spanish painting in the five centuries from the late medieval period to Goya. However, the Budapest exhibition was really quite different from the German one as about half of the 102 paintings did not appear in the German version. The generous loans made by the German institutions, especially the Gemäldegalerie of Dresden (which alone lent seventeen works) were further supplemented by twelve masterpieces from the Prado, Madrid, and by three from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. With these loans and several masterpieces from our own collections, we were able to present the development of Spanish painting on a scale and with a richness that had been unprecedented in Hungary, providing a multifarious view of the major movements and subjects as well as the work of the three great masters whose names feature in the title of the exhibition. The small "introductory" room of the exhibition presented only two works (a fourteenthcentury Castilian sculpture and an early fifteenth-century painting by Pere Vall), which represented the very period which can be defined as having a distinct Spanish approach to the arts. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of fifteenth-century Spanish art is the development of the retablo, an architectonical feature set up at the back of an altar, typical of the Iberian Peninsula. The second room of the exhibition was dominated by an installation in which the retable panels are arranged within a schematic architectonic construction according to their original placement in the retable. Although the individual panels did not belong to the same retable and even differed somewhat in scale and style, they complemented one another well, revealing the
