Hajós György: Heroes' Square - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)

The Exhibition Hall being decorated for the reburial of Imre Nagy and his fellow-martyrs

destroyed or taken abroad in the course of the nation’s turbulent history. The core of the collection was once the property of the aristocracy, the high clergy and wealthy individuals. To this were later added government purchases and various donations. For want of adequate space, this collection could not be exhibited. The pictures removed from the palace in Pozsony (today’s Bratislava) to Buda (and acquired by the government of Hungary in 1849) were held in the National Museum. It was between 1832 and 1836 that the treasury purchased the collection of the reputed Reform Age collector Miklós Jankovich; in 1836 the Archbishop of Eger János Pyrker donated his famous, 192-piece, gallery to the National Museum; in 1869 Bishop Arnold Ipolyi, one of the founding fathers of Hungarian historiography, presented the National Gallery with his private collection, which was housed in the building of the Hungarian Academy of Science. It was also here that the Esterházy collection, an acquisition consisting of 637 paintings, 3,535 drawings and 51,301 engravings purchased by the government in 1870, was set up after its transfer from Vienna to Pest. Academician and leading art historian Károly Pulszky kept methodically enlarging the collection during his tenure as the director of the National Gallery, which he introduced to the whole of Europe by his scholarly publications. Acting on gov43