János György
Szilágyi
A Forty-Eighter's
Vita Contemplativa
Ferenc Pulszky (1814-1889)
[...]
Pulszky was born in Eperjes (Pres[Sinvcircumflex]ov/Bart feld) in 1814,
of untitled gentry stock. Four languages were spoken in the town, then
in Upper Hungary, now in Slovakia, which had a population of seven to eight
thousand. The first was German, after which came Hungarian; in addition,
depending on the social position of the speaker, Slovak and Latin were
also used. Pulszky spoke all four, but since his family thought that his
Hungarian needed polishing up, he was, at the age of twelve, sent to Miskolc
for one year. After that he returned to his hometown to complete his schooling
at the renowned Lutheran College at Eperjes. Until the age of fourteen
his reading had almost entirely been confined to Hungarian literature,
then he was given a small library by his uncle, making a broad range of
world literature available to him in German translation, from Tasso's Gerusalemme
liberata to Calderon's plays, and from Walter Scott's novels to Voltaire,
Lessing, Wieland and Hauff. At that time, it seemed that literature would
become his main pursuit in life and although he sustained this affinity
till the end, it showed itself less in his accomplishments as a creative
writer than in his articulateness, both academic and political, and in
personal communication.
The gift of books was merely a prelude. A year later the uncle, Gábor
Fejérváry, whom Pulszky had hardly known before, came to
Eperjes with the intention of returning to his family estate permanently.
It was on his journey to Pest, when helping to wind up his uncle's home,
that Pulszky first saw genuine antique art, a marble statue of Venus. After
that experience his love for antique objects never waned.
[...]
In his capacity as a lawyer, Fejérváry became acquainted
with the outstanding art collectors of the first third of the nineteenth
century. It filled him with revulsion to watch how the general revival
of patriotism threatened a withdrawal into provincialism, so much so that
his opposition to the mentality of those conservative and uneducated men
who tried to make a false virtue out of Hungary's cultural isolation became
an obsession with him. He thought that isolation from European culture
was "the Hungarians' greatest defect", and did everything in
his power to try to counteract this. According to the evidence of a catalogue
compiled in 1849, his library, beside works by the classical Greek and
Roman authors, as well as an English-language Arabian Nights and the Nibe
lungen lied, and of course in addition to the books he had given to Pulszky,
contained works by Milton, Pope, Byron and Shelley; Molière, Racine,
La Fontaine, Le Sage, Balzac, Victor Hugo and Musset; Dante, Petrarca,
Ariosto, Tasso, Aretino, Machia velli, Castiglione, Alfieri, Goldoni and
Silvio Pellico; Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Brentano.
Fejérváry was also familiar with the economic theories of
Adam Smith and Bentham.
[...]
The relationship was anything but one-sided. "A new world of ideas
opened up for me," half a century later Pulszky recollected the influence
that his uncle's move to Eperjes had exerted on him. His passing encounter
with the statue of Venus was followed by an ever-growing familiarity with
antique works of art. While helping his uncle to move to Eperjes, Pulszky
had a chance to inspect the most important private collections in the country.
His uncle was glad to see that Pulszky "took a serious interest in
antiquities and studied his collection in a scholarly manner". This
was a great boost to Fejérváry's habit of collecting works
of art and specialist books. His collection of archaeological books, which
he regularly added to with new works bought in Vienna, came to include
almost every major book published on the subject up to his time (with volumes
by Winckelmann, Zoega, G. B. Visconti, Millingen and Micali, the Vasi candelabri,
cippi of Piranesi, almost every work by Gerhard, Antiquities of Athens
by Stuart and Revett, all the great collections of reproductions, from
Mont faucon and the eight volumes of Le Antichità di Erco lano,
published between 1757 and 1792, to the Museum Etruscum Gregoria num and
the first volume of Élite de la Céramo graphie by Lenormant-de
Witte). He subscribed to the Bullettino dell'Ins tituto and Monumen ti,
Annali and Archäo logische Zeitung, as well as the Revue Archéolo
gique, from the moment that the first issue of the latter appeared in 1844.
The majority of these works were only available in Hungary in the house
in Eperjes, where Fejérváry had his rooms decorated with
Pompeiian motifs, copied from Wilhelm Zahn's sheets and, after 1835, with
small reproductions of the Elgin Marbles, made by his friend, J. D. Böhm
in Rome.
That was the milieu, physical and intellectual, in which the Fejérváry-Pulszky
collection took shape. Fejérváry, who always held decided
views on matters of taste, was the first collector in Hungary to concentrate
on the classical cultures of Antiquity. He took little interest in Euro
pean art after the Trecento (in this respect only his collections of prints
and majolica were of note), but the Greek, Etruscan and Roman objects,
which constituted the core of his collection, were primarily complemented
by Egyptian and, to a lesser degree, by Assyrian, Achaemenidian and Sassanidian
pieces, along with works by Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Pre-Colum bian
Mexican artists--in other words, he regarded the concept of Antique art,
as defined by Winckelmann or his opponents, to be too narrow. His tastes
allowed him to see that Antique Greek and Roman art belonged with the other
great cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Merely by relying
on his eyes, without any theoretical training, he went beyond accepted
scholarly views, abandoning a Europe-centred concept and extending his
interest to all the high cultures of the "Antique age" known
to man at the time.
[...]
What he liked most of all, however, was going on journeys looking for
things to buy. It was in 1833 that he first took along Pulszky, to reward
him for having reached the Iliad in his study of Greek, but also with the
professed purpose of training him as a judge of works of art and adviser
when making purchases. In as much as
it can be reconstructed from Pulszky's memoirs and Fejérváry's
stockbook, their itinerary was the following: Pozsony (Pressburg), Vienna
(meeting Anton Stein büchel, the director of the Antique collection),
Munich (meeting Friedrich Thiersch, one of the early topographers of Ancient
Greece and a student of Greek vase, who gave Pulszky his "archeological
blessing" for solving an iconographical problem; Como, Milan, Brescia,
Verona, Venice (the meeting with Eduard Gerhard), Bologna, Florence, Cor
tona, Perugia, Terni, Rome. Here Pulszky befriended the two leading figures
of the Instituto di Cor rispondenza Archeologica, the first scholarly institute
of archeology, which had only recently been established with Prus sian
support. One was Gerhard, responsible for laying the academic foundations,
and the other Bunsen, Prussian envoy to the Holy See, who acted as chief
secretary of the Institute for three decades. After Tivoli and Frascati,
they continued their journey to Naples, where they were welcomed by Fejérváry's
old friend, James Milligan, an acclaimed student of antique coins, sculpture
and vase paintings. Also, they were able to meet Sir William Gell, a gentleman
studying the topography of Troy, Ithaca, Pompeii and Rome. They were given
a guided tour in the museum by the scholarly Canon A. de Jorio; and finally,
they explored the uncovered section of Pompeii in the company of Wilhelm
Zahn, before returning to Eperjes by the same route. As an aftermath of
the journey, Pulszky, in the following year, at the age of twenty, was
elected as a correspondent of the Instituto (partly in appreciation for
sending his drawings of works of art in Hungarian collections). In accordance
with the wishes of the founders, the Instituto had a decidedly international
character, with the exchange of views and information between scholars
of various countries listed among the Institute's objectives (hence its
designation). In fact, the organization preserved this character within
the actual limitations of the times even after 1859, when it was renamed
as the German Archeological Institute.
[...]
In the course of the four-month journey in 1844, which was to be their
last, they followed their earlier route to Naples (this time with a little
detour to Civitavecchia to visit Stendhal's antiquarian friend, Daniele
Bucci) and back. Beside being able to add considerably to the collection,
it was during this trip that Pulszky matured into an expert thanks to his
committed and methodical study of the material he inspected in art collections,
at the same time developing an interest in the practical problems of archeology.
In Rome he learned from Depoletti, among others, how to fit together potsherds
to make up a vase; before that Zahn instructed him in the technique of
fresco painting; then he learned from Böhm how to recognize modern
copies of Antique coins and niellos, developing an interest in fake engraved
stones, which at the time grew in number at a proliferous rate. Böhm
guided him to appreciate Re naissance painting, a school that failed to
move Fejérváry. Pulszky's marriage in 1846 only provided
a brief break. In 1847 he was elected a full member of the Academy.
[...]
Pulszky arrived in London in early 1849. His disembarkment was reported
in the Daily News, the journal of which he was soon to be a correspondent,
thus continuing the political campaign he had already begun to wage for
the Hungarian cause in the pages of the Allgemeine Zeitung when he was
still in Hungary. Due to the versatility of his interests and skills, he
soon became a welcome guest in the highest political circles as well as
among scholars, writers and journalists. His relentless propaganda on behalf
of Kossuth was for a time confined to writing newspaper articles. These
were also his main source of income, along with literary works written
either jointly with his wife or on his own, including a publication of
Hungarian folk tales, which he himself had collected around 1840. Meanwhile,
he did not for a moment abandon the pursuit of archeology. He soon became
a familiar face in
the British Museum, regularly attending the sessions of the recently established
Archeological (Royal Archeological after 1866) Institute, where, on January
3, 1851, he gave a presentation of the drawings he had made of the various
items of the Fejérváry collection. In an article discussing
the centennial of the Society of Antiquaries, Pulszky's name was mentioned
among the names of British aristocrats and foreign diplomats who attended
the dinner marking the end of the celebrations. He soon came to command
such respect in the British Museum that he was asked to give a paper on
the questions of its organization and the arrangement of its exhibitions.
In a lecture entitled "On the Progress and Decay of Art; and on the
Arrangement of a National Museum", which he delivered in University
Hall, London, he criticized the British Museum not only because of the
way it covered the whole universe, in which "we go from the masterworks
of the Parthenon straight up to the stuffed seal and buffalo, and two monster
giraffes stand as sentinels before the gallery of vases", but also
for its one-sided approach, its restriction to the art of the Greeks, Romans
and Etruscans, demanding the extension of collecting work and interest
to cover Egyptian, Assirian, Persian, Indian, and even Chinese and Japanese
art--as indeed had been the case in the Fejérváry collection
(although excluding from this list of "civilised nations" the
art of the peoples of Africa and Oceania), so as to be able to give a complete
picture of the entire artistic imagination of mankind. (He thence proposed
that the presentation of original objects should be complemented with a
display of plaster casts). In addition, he vehemently criticized the museums'
and the British Museum's exhibitions in particular for their neglect of
artistic development, that is chronology, in the arrangement of their displays.
As the historical relics of various ages and peoples are mixed in the exhibitions,
"though we see the monuments we cannot understand them."
At the time of the lecture, these were basic problems, which had either
just recently emerged or were in the process of emerging; this was just
prior to the breakthrough of the ideas of evolution and historicism as
the absolute principles of categorization. This latter completely rejected
the notion of all-round museums as reflecting the demand of earlier centuries
to represent the cosmos in its entirety (surviving examples of this are
the Liverpool Museum or the Royal Scottish Museum), and wanted to replace
them by specialized museums, or at least by exhibitions organized according
to intellectually related items, with separate ethnographical, natural
sciences, etc. collections. In any case, in Pulszky's view the final goal
should be the documentation of the "unity of man kind", rather
than the contrasts and rivalry of national cultures. With its "astounding
lucidity"1 the lecture came to play an acknowledged part
in the history of the British Museum. Pulszky's criticism of the Glyptothek
of Munich and the Berlin Museum similarly addressed vital questions These
institutes were criticised for subordinating the museum's educational function
to architectural effects in the case of the former, and to an ostentatious
display of wealth in the case of the latter.
To illustrate his lecture, there were drawings of "amazing execution"2
showing items of the Fejérváry collection. In 1851 Fejérváry
died, leaving his entire collection to his nephew. It arrived in London
within a few months almost in full. When the text of the lecture was published
in 1852, in Pulszky's absence, the editor's note named Raikes Curries as
the owner of the collection. Apparently, that was the name of Pulszky's
banker, who was willing to buy the collection under his own name, so as
to prevent its confiscation.
After Kossuth's arrival in England, Pulszky immediately
joined his entourage, accompanying him on his seven-month tour of the United
States in late 1851, acting as his press officer and also, on some occasions,
as his speech writer. Neverthe less, Pulszky remained faithful to his "other"
self. In Boston, where they stayed for a longer period, he made the acquaintance
of a number of scholars, poets and politicians, such as Longfellow, Emerson,
the eminent zoologist and geologist J. L. R. Agassiz, William Prescott,
author of the classic books on the conquest of Mexico and Peru, J. Sparks,
Washing ton's biographer, and the publisher of his works, Charles Sumner,
a leading opponent of the Mexican war and a prominent abolitionist. In
a gesture that reveals the high esteem in which he was held, Pulszky was
invited to fill the recently vacated position of Professor of Modern History
at Harvard University. After some deliberation he turned down the offer,
and returned to England with Kossuth in the summer of 1852. Jointly with
his wife, they published an account of their American experiences in the
best-selling Red, White, Black, in which their admiration for the democratic
institutions of the United States was mixed with a certain amount of criticism
of some aspects of American life. The book's documentary value, in addition
to the passages taken from his wife's diary, was provided by the sections
describing the personal relations between Pulszky and the leading figures
of the American intellectual and political elite. (According to the review
in the Daily News, "if this book is not received and read with eagerness,
the fact will be in itself a curious sign of the times". [...] Following
his return to England after two months in the States, he settled in London
for the next few years, earning a living through his academic qualifications
and literary and journalistic skills. He was the political correspondent
of a number of English and American papers regularly covering current news
regarding museums. He also toured the country giving lectures on archaeo
logy, resumed his connections with the Archaeological Institute, procuring
their enthusiastic support for an exhibition featuring the works of the
collection still bearing the name of Fejérváry, held in the
Institute's rooms between May 23 and July 9, 1853. The exhibition was enjoined
with a series of lectures, in which Pulszky covered the history of ancient
art from Egypt through Mesopotamia, India and China to Greece and Etruria.
Ad mis sion fees were charged. The more than thousand comments in the visitors'
book are evidence of the success of the exhibition.
Pulszky's specialized field of archaeology was glyptics, interest in which
had once again revived, enabling him to profit from his expertise in the
evaluation of engraved stones. Although he worked for the British Museum
on a regular basis, he did not seek a permanent position there, as he did
not want to give up his hopes of an eventual return to Hungary. He frequented
the company of prominent scholars, writers, politicians and art collectors,
even finding time to resume contact with some of his old friends. He was
in continuous communication with the politicians of various nations in
exile, including Mazzini (with whom he exchanged letters right until the
latter's death), Saffi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Herzen. He was drawn
to Lord Lansdowne both as a politician and as an art collector, and more
or less the same could be said about his relations with Lord Dudley Stuart,
a staunch advocate of Polish independence and son-in-law of Prince Lucien
Bonaparte. He was a close friend of the great geologist Sir Charles Lyell,
in whose house he often dined with Darwin; he corresponded with Dickens
and met Thackeray and Coleridge on several occasions. Many scholars of
Antiquity were among his acquaintances, including George Peabody, then
residing in London; Charles Fellows, the founder of the archaeology museum
of that name at Stan ford University, who helped the British Museum to
acquire the burial monument of Harpya at Xanthos; Sir Charles Thomas Newton,
the discoverer of the Mausoleum at Hali karnas sus; the Assyrologist G.
Smith; Th. Goldstücker, the famous Sanskrit scholar, under whose guidance
Pulszky even embarked on a study of the language, "with more diligence
than success"; and George Grote, the author of the monumental History
of Greece.
Pulszky paid close attention to art dealings in England, as shown by the
reports he sent (until 1859), regularly to Archäo logischer Anzeiger,
published by the Insti tutio in Rome; he also sent to Rome reproductions
of the major pieces in his collection for publication. However, the financial
burden associated with the growth of his family, and, even more importantly,
his decision to change the direction of his collecting activities, led
him to sell some items, and even whole sections, of his collection. His
majolicas went to a French art dealer, and in 1855 his Mexican antiquities,
including the famous Fejérváry-Mayer codex, his prehistoric
items and the most valuable part of his collection, the ivories --which
the British Museum, to public out rage, turned down--were acquired by the
goldsmith, art collector and art dealer Joseph Mayer of Liverpool, who
passed them on to the Liverpool Museum. A little later Pulszky's gold jewellery,
along with a number of other items, passed into the pos session of the
British Museum with
F. R. P. Bööcke as intermediary. Parallel to all this, however,
Pulszky continued to collect glyptics and small bronzes. In the
huge exhibition of British private collectors, which was held in Manchester
in 1857 and which was a turning point in the history of British tastes
and of art collecting in general, Pulszky was represented by his bronzes,
articles of gold and silver, ivo ries (by then in Mayer's possession, which
the committee awarded with a special di plo ma), and, as noted in the Catalogue
of the exhibition, "a nice collection of intaglios and cameas, articles
from India and China, and a memorable series of bronzes from China."
In the following year he held a highly successful exhibition of his engraved
stones in a London gallery. We can only assume that many more articles
pas sed through his collection during these years. His relation to the
academic world was not passive: in 1856, at Mayer's request, he wrote a
catalogue for the Fejér váry ivories. In its own time this
long essay entitled "General Remarks on Antique Ivory Carvings",
was regarded as a pio neer ing work, and it is worth reading even today.
[...]
All the post-1867 holders of high office in Hungarian culture, most
notably the novelist Baron József Eötvös, twice Minister
of Culture and a childhood friend of his, had considered Pulszky to be
the best candidate to head the Hungarian National Museum even during Pulszky's
stay in Italy. That was just about the only representative and comprehensive
public collection in the country at the time. Pulszky received his appointment
in early 1869 and, as a member of the governing Deák Party, he also
took a seat in Parlia ment. For the next decade, the two sides of Pulszky's
life intertwined. The real challenge, a social position demanding his capacities,
now lay ahead of him. He returned from exile as an expert scholar com manding
international respect. (Almost as soon as he arrived, the Academy unanimously
elected him as member, "as the first and most knowledgeable practitioner
of archeology.") What was even more exceptional was that his expertise
was accompanied by a broad intellectual and political horizon. Yet, the
fate of every Hun garian messiah was in store for Pulszky, too. Initially,
he was taken aback to find that those who had come home some time before,
accepting an amnesty, now ignored him; he soon, however, reconciled himself
to the thought that "for the third time he must serve in the ranks,
even though with a confirmed officer's commission," and as a museum
director, as well as a member of Parliament, he set out on a crusade over
a quarter of a century to create a new Hungary, which was only interrupted
by his death. It was in the area of scholarship that he could achieve most,
clearly realizing that this was a matter of life and death for the country
and nation as envisioned by him. In other words, he understood that the
establishment of a scholarly institute of international standing also meant
a victory in the fight for national independence. Therefore, he did everything
in his power to realize the objectives he had outlined in the lecture he
had given long before in the British Museum. In 1875, shortly after his
appointment, he published in the pages of Budapesti Szemle his second programme,
"On Museums". In sharp contrast with his earlier, more narrowly
conceived approach, his ideal collection now had to have a universal character
in the broadest possible sense of the term; from such collections, "due
to their broad outlook, nothing that demonstrates the cultural betterment
of the human race, or nothing that sheds light on this betterment, is alien".
That precise phrasing has lost none of its relevance. He contrasted this
ideal with the "nations of limited ambitions, which are aware of their
second- or third-rate status, and which, for the same reason, display self-conceit
to make up for the great nations' self-esteem". This can explain why,
in those nations, "we are more likely to find provincial museums,
which serve less as institutes of public education, and more as instruments
of boasting."
It was in the spirit of such principles that he embarked upon the reorganization
of the Hungarian National Museum, turning it into a chain of centres for
scholarship and, realizing the founding idea at a higher level, elevating
it to be the fun-damental institute of national culture. Keeping alive
every initiative that he judged useful, he organized academic departments.
He laid down the foundations for international research and did it primarily
through encouraging the growth of specialized libraries (when he took up
office, the archeology library had two hundred books; when he left the
museum, it had more than ten thousand). Most importantly, he created the
outlines of the
specialized museums and collections into which the monstrous mass of collections
had to be transformed. He was the effective founder of a number of museums:
ethnography, natural sciences, fine arts, applied arts and Eastern Asian
art. He urged the enlargement of the collection of minerals and arranged
for the segregation of the zoological, botanical and mineral collections;
he established the sphragistic/heraldic collection and the collection
of plaster casts and photographs, which proved ever more indispensable
in line with the modern concept of museums. He set up a fund to finance
travel for scholars, both at home and abroad, thus encouraging them to
join in international academic life, to participate in international conferences
and to maintain personal contact with their foreign colleagues in the special
fields, all that in the belief that nothing that was not good enough to
be universal could be good as national.
[...]
He fought his greatest battles, as long as he could speak, in front
of the general public. Universal interests, international academic standards--all
this was just one aspect for him, albeit an essential one, of a much greater
requirement, even though these ideas made him feel isolated from contemporary
scholarschip: "to engage in scholarship, in the disinterested search
for truth, without any prejudices and practical profit", to reach
equality with other nations in the field of learning, these ideas in themselves
were enough to create suspicion. Nor did it help his case that he excelled
in parliamentary debate, or indeed in any area of public life, almost daily,
through the superiority of the educated mind over a backwoods nobility,
unable to adjust to the new middle-class world and interested only in fighting
for its own privileges.
In the course of his campaigns in the interest of museums, as evidenced
in the establishment of the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and in his struggle
to obtain the necessary support for the purchase of Prince Lobkowitz's
collection of minerals or the Esterházy gallery, and indeed in his
public speeches on any other subject, it became increasingly more obvious
with the changing of the political climate that Pulszky's thinking was
radically different from that of the majority of the Hungarian society
of his time. The conservative Gyõzõ Concha was able to
define the essence of the difference very precisely, when he pointed out
that "while most people saw in the laws of 1848 the final formula
of liberty and equality and the sacred palladium of national aspirations,"
Pulszky only regarded them as the starting point on the road to radical
democracy. His decision to quit the ruling party in protest against the
occupation of Bosnia, coupled with his ability to realize that this was
the beginning of a conflict that would necessarily end in war, and his
determination to speak up against all anti-democratic slogans, finally
led to his expulsion from Parliament.
[...]
The international conference on prehistoric archeology and anthropology,
held in 1876 in Pest, and presided over by Flóris Rómer,
provided the grand opening of this era. Its main attractions were an exhibition
of copper-age objects arranged by József Hampel and Pulszky's lecture,
which, for the first time, classified the copper-age material found in
Hungary. In the foreword to the work, which was published in a monographic
form in Hungarian in 1883 and in German in 1884, Pulszky looked back on
his life, maintaining that if it had not been for compelling circumstances,
he would have devoted his main efforts to archeology. In his capacities
as Chairman of the Academy's Archeology Committee, and for a while Vice
President of the Academy, but also as the National Super intendent of Museums
and Libraries, Pulszky was working on the establishment and enlargement
of a national network of museums and libraries that would grow beyond the
National Museum. He did so with evident success. The establishment of provincial
museums, naturally with the active participation of enthusiastic local
supporters, was in large part the result of his efforts as a superintendent.
In the meantime, he wrote regularly, publishing in the bulletin Archaeologiai
Értesítõ on the latest finds, whether prehistoric
or Celtic, Roman or Migration-period, often accompanied by far-reaching
and pioneering discoveries, just as the journey in 1875 had its exciting
academic results.
[...]
1 n J. Jenkins: Archeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Garden
of the British Museum 1800-1939, 1992, pp. 57-58.
2 n Editor's note to the text of Pulszky's lecture published in The Museum
of Classical Antiquities, March 1852.
János György
Szilágyi,
Curator of Antiquities at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, is
an authority on Etruscan pottery.
