László Cs. Szabó
Dreams of a City
(From Theft to Theft)
Well, the multiple thefts of this ancient four-in-hand have always been heard far beyond Gönc. I am not being eccentric, setting off with a Hungarian folk ballad, since the musicologists tell us that its music has origin in northern Italy. And the horses we are talking about are Italian, too... How careless of me, of course not Italian, they are Venetian! Which is vastly different. They are Venetian - that is, since 1204.
You may already have guessed that I am speaking of the four shapely, haughty bronze horses adorning the balcony of St. Mark's Cathedral. Their closely-cropped manes end in smart forelocks, their eyes are wild, like the eyes preserved from their heads to their chests. [...]
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There are not many four-in-hands in the entire world that are as well-known as this. Partly because there isn't another four-in-hand in history that has been stolen so many times - I am surprised that the hero of our ballad, the horse-thief László Fehér didn't get hand on them.
One of the four is no a temporary guest of the Royal Academy in London. It as lent after one and a half years of negotiations, partly to obtain a few more millions (in hard currency) for the repairs of the peeling, sinking, collapsing magic city, and partly out of an art historian's detective instinct, that with the help of the thirty-odd loans that were herded around the guest of honour - all antique horses, their age and mysterious could at last be clarified. There are a few amazing discoveries in this herd, very recent ones, fresh from the bottom of the Italian seas, the Italians themselves haven't seen them yet in public. The cost of the exhibition is enormous, sponsored by Olivetti, the typewriter-king. Not by the Italian Government, who years ago, shhh! - quietly used the proceeds of the first great Save Venice campaign to finance its own budget deficit. It borders on the unbelievable, even after a marathon of negotiations, that Venice allowed this horse go, given the obstinate local belief that Venice is doomed if the four horses ever leave it. Rather a self-centered belief, after all they are not natives of Venice; indeed as I have said, these are the four horses most often stolen in history. Stolen, robbed, pillaged, looted. We can make our own choice of word. Any of them testifies the admiring appreciation of the looter and may add the pride of the bronze horses
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Translated by Barbara Piazza-Georgi
László Cs. Szabó
(1905-1984) was a noted essayist, critic and teacher of art history at the Budapest Academy of Arts when he left the county in 1948. After spending some years in Italy, he eventually settled in London in 1951 and worked for the Hungarian Section of the BBC, continuing to publish volumes of essays, short stories, poems and autobiographical writings in Hungarian
