Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)
Funereal art, and within that funeral sculpture, reached its zenith in Budapest at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. That was the last period before this classic branch of the arts disintegrated in Europe in modernisation's wake. As closely related to the transcendental as its nearest relative ecclesiastic art is, funereal art is a sacred activity, centred upon the concept of the other world and life after death. These concepts were challenged by the ascendant materialistic ideologies of the 19th century, which discarded Jewish and Classical as well as Christian traditions. European civilization gradually abandoned the cult of the dead. Although the formal conventions of the art form survived, the substance behind its symbolism was largely forgotten, and even that superficial knowledge was altogether lost in the 20th century. Despite the existence of some scanty evidence to the contrary, familiarity with the traditions of funereal art and its characteristic classic proportions and iconography is now regarded as a waste of time rather than a binding canon. The sepulchral art of Budapest and Hungary is in a peculiar position as its formal sophistication and technical development reached unprecedented heights at a time when the art had already begun to be drained of its substance. While the funeral monuments raised at the time of the Dual Monarchy represented unprecedented levels of professional sophistication, the symbols and motifs applied had a primarily aesthetic, rather than sacred, function. When sepulchres closer in spirit to the original sacred quality of funereal art untouched by the secularity of later times were once again raised in a growing number after World War I, the absence of sufficient finances prevented the application of previous standards of professional excellence. In its current decline, funereal art is being superseded by the industry of monumental masonry, itself threatened by a bleak future as new forms of funeral practices — such as the scattering of ashes — call the very existence of cemeteries, at least those in larger cities, into question. Everything is deemed irrelevant by modern man that is not related to the here and now. In spite of that, there still exist a large number of sepulchres worth discovering and introducing due to their adherence to classical standards, their value as architectural and sculptural monuments or the fact that they represent something either typical or peculiar. It would be illusory to ignore that all this is of marginal relevance to the artistic life of the present. Today's emblematic object dart is a crumpled-up paper-bag. From that perspective, funereal art can hardly be more than a laughingstock of choice for the derisive aesthete. 5
