Zsuzsa Gonda
The Man Who Designed Heroes' Square
Schickedanz Albert (1846–1915): Ezredévi emlékmûvek múltnak és jövõnek (Millennial Monuments to the Past and the Future). Catalogue to the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, 19 September 1996–31 December 1996. Catalogue of works and introduction also in English. Ed. by Eszter Gábor and Mária Verõ. Budapest, 1996, 456 pp.
For more than three months, the huge posters on the central colonnade of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts proclaimed Schickedanz 1846–1915 in huge gilded script. Most visitors, however, were only made aware inside that the subject of the exhibition was the man who had designed the building.
A water colour sketch of the planned spatial arrangement of the Museum of Fine Arts, mounted to be folded in three. Paper on cardboard. 328 x 493 mm. Budapest Museum |
.The Museum of Fine Arts is the country's prime art collection. Its opening in 1906 was attended by Francis Joseph, the Emperor-King in person, but the Museum has not dealt kindly with the man who designed, along with the building, the whole ensemble making up the monumental Heroes' Square, the Hõsök tere or Heldenplatz. In fact, the Museum did not bother to acquire his architectural designs, nor paintings or water-colours as they cropped up in the art market. Of the more than a hundred items exhibited only three large sheets are from the Museum's own Department of Prints & Drawings , two perspectives that were part of the 1899 competition, and an inner perspective of the Renaissance Hall. It might be mentioned by way of excuse that Historicism, the key to Schickedanz, has only achieved the status of a period worth studying within the past quarter of a century in Hungary.
There isn't a soul today who thinks of Historicist architects or designers as the servile copycats of times passed. On the contrary, their superior skills and knowledge of history are much admired. The artists looked for the best in every style, their longing was to create something perfect, the real thing, by combining the chosen elements.
Competition entry for the Museum of Fine Arts (1899). Perspective view. Paper on cardboard. Water-colour. 515 x 825 mm. Museum of Fine Arts, Department of Prints & Drawings. |
To this day Historicist architecture defines the Budapest townscape. It was the style of the post-Compromise (1867) building boom, and it ruled right up to the end of the 19th century. In those few decades the united market towns of Pest and Buda metamorphosed into the metropolis Budapest. The building boom suffered a break at the time of the 1873 economic crisis, but it picked up again at the end of the seventies, and peaked at the time of the millennium around 1896.
New kinds of public buildings mushroomed as a by-product of urbanization: theatres, railway stations, banks, department stores, university buildings and hospitals. The status of Historicism was, however, established primarily by the large-scale public buildings of the time, Parliament, the Curia (or Supreme Court, now the Museum of Ethnography) and the extensions to the Royal Palace. The demographic explosion entailed the building of many dwellings, primarily blocks of flats.
Final plan of the elevation to Aréna út (today Dózsa György út). Pencil drawing. 511 x 736 mm. National Archives. |
The features of the Budapest of Historicism - often labelled as Eclecticism - were nowhere near as integrated as those of Neo-Classicist Pest had been in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Neo-Renaissance, of which Miklós Ybl was the most prominent architect, was gradually replaced by something more mouvementé and picturesque which, by the end of the century, was close to the Baroque.
Opportunities attracted architects from distant lands. Schickedanz, who came from a family of Saxon burghers in Northern ("Upper") Hungary, was no revolutionary genius, says Eszter Gábor. Indeed, Schickedanz's oeuvre beautifully shows the care and the concern for art and craftsmanship of architects of that age.
Zsuzsa Gonda
is curator of the Department of Prints & Drawings at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and co-author, with Teréz Gerszi, of he catalogue Nineteenth Century German, Austrian and Hungarian Drawings from Budapest, Art Services International, 1994.
