Árpád Mikó
Through Our Looking Glass
History-Image.
Selected Examples of the Interplay between Past and Art in Hungary.
Exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery, March 17-September 24, 2000.
Exhibition arranged and catalogue edited by Árpád Mikó and Katalin Sinkó.
As a national institution, the Hungarian National Gallery commemorated the millennial year with an exhibition suitable for the occasion. Its theme was the changing relationship between art and the past, specifically national history. Not an easy option was chosen (perhaps expected on such occasions), and no pleasant tour through scenes of Hungarian history, as if in a slide show, was on offer. Such presentations abound these days; we instead started out from the insight that each age created its own image of history, or more precisely, that each age reshaped its past according to its own image. History can be manipulated, and itself manipulates; the fine arts have always had an important role in this manipulation. We wanted to demonstrate the operation and effects of this mechanism.
The exhibition was divided into sixteen large sections. These were essentially thematic groupings, but as certain themes were preferred in certain ages, the sections followed each other in a loose chronological order; ultimately, they did outline a thousand years of the Hungarian state. Since the primary approach was reflexive, these thousand years of history appear, as it were, in a mirror, often a distorting mirror, which demanded a great deal of mental cooperation from the public, something they may not be used to in Hungarian exhibition rooms. The exhibition, in other words, made for a difficult reading-if very attractive, presenting important works of art.
It is always difficult to provide a non-canonical image of national history without running the risk of offending the public, especially if the image is at points disrespectful and the majority of visitors still cling to those tragic clichés of national history the 19th century cultivated. To make our perspective obvious from the very start, we placed works of contemporary art from the recent past near the entrance. Visitors could walk into the first room along the large boards of Lili Országh's series Requiem on Seven Boards in Memory of Destroyed Cities and People. In the room vast mirrors created a labyrinth, in the centre of which stood Erzsébet Schaár's Sisters, a sculpted pair standing back to back, reminiscent of Janus, looking at the same time into the past and toward the future. The faces of the enigmatic figures, standing with timeless dignity, are golden death masks. We placed a third gilded face opposite them, the famous medieval reliquiary from Trencsén. The two golden masks facing each other and multiplied in the mirrors created an intellectual space which was at the same time the space of the exhibition. Access to the past is through the present, and in this play of mirrors, among the golden faces visitors could discover their own as well.
The head-shaped reliquiary was also the first exhibit in the first section, The Cult of Relics. It constitutes a further play with time: the relic stands outside time, because the saint it represents for believers lives in eternity; the reliquiary, on the other hand, is bound to its time, as is its cult. We displayed reliquiaries which bear especially good testimony to the changes of history. When the Trencsén reliquiary arrived at the National Museum at the beginning of the 19th century, it was believed to be the portrait of the notorious 14th-century baron, Máté Csák. Later historians wished to discern a likeness of Saint Ladislaus, with little success. The 18th-century bust reliquiaries of the three House of Árpád saints (Stephen, Ladislaus and Emeric) were transferred to the Schatzkammer in Vienna by Maria Theresa, whence they returned to Hungary after the First World War, when the Venice Treaty ordained the partition of the Imperial collections. We also treated the revival of the relic cult at the end of the last century, when churches attempted to acquire as many national saintly relics as possible. The second section of the exhibition Saint Royalties-Royal Saints illustrated the late-medieval iconographic topoi of national saints. As is well-known, the canonization of Stephen and Emeric was initiated by Ladislaus, partly to legitimize his own rule. It is difficult to grasp the moment when, or the process by which, the images of saints, originally objects of a religious cult, become images of history, when their profane content becomes prominent and they start conveying a contemporary political message. "The three royal saints of Hungary" had become symbols of the country by the end of the 15th century, occasionally accompanied by the Virgin Mary as Patrona Hungariae. When the emperor Maximilian I wanted to acquire the Hungarian throne at the beginning of the 16th century, he made sure to include the saint kings among his ancestors, especially Saint Stephen, whose bronze figure stands onMaximilian's Innsbruck tomb. Special too is the status of St John of Alms among naturalized saints: the body of the patriarch of Alexandria was given to King Matthias by the Sultan of Turkey in 1489, as a gift of diplomacy. It quickly became the principal relic of the royal castle's chapel in Buda, and its cult spread all over the country. With the fall of Buda (1541) and the Turkish invasion it lost its significance, and it was only in 17th-century Pozsony that they made an attempt to revive the cult, at the suggestion of that leading figure of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Péter Pázmány. Eventually, it became part of the private cult of the Esztergom archbishop: it has stood in the burial chapel of Imre Esterházy since the 18th century.
The third section of the exhibition (The Legacy of Antiquity) was devoted to the Renaissance, the renewed interest in Antiquity in the 15th and 16th centuries. Portraits of King Matthias were initiated and interpreted by humanists, and made by artists after the images of great Roman emperors. There is a unique category of representations, in which Matthias, "the second Attila," bears the demonic face of the Hun, destroyer of civilizations. In the same section we displayed so-called "pagan coin" urns and jewellery from the early 16th century, first appearing in Buda but later popular everywhere, which bear testimony to the early reception and appreciation of antiquities (hewn stone monuments, coins and cameos) found in old Roman provinces on the territory of Hungary (Pannonia, Dacia).
The fourth section (Illustrated History [14th-17th centuries]) was a collection of illustrations from historical works, primarily wood engravings in printed Hungarian histories that depict rulers and battles. After János Thuróczy's 1488 chronicle, first appearing in Brünn and then in Augsburg, no illustrated histories of Hungary were published in the country until the 17th century. (Mausoleum, published in 1664, was no more than a collection of eulogies with portraits of monarchs.) In the Netherlands, however, several volumes were published (German translations of the works of Thuróczy and Antonio Bonfini), as interest in Hungarian history grew immensely in the 16th century-due largely to the Turkish expansion. The representation of Hungarians in these volumes is sometimes very derogatory, but images of history must also include those that others create about us.
Through important examples of the late-Renaissance and Baroque cult of Hungarian saints, the fifth section (Regnum Marianum) illustrated the typical relations that those struggling with the Turks and the Habsburgs maintained with a sacred past. There were many and various examples of the cult of the devotional picture of Mariazell-presented to the Church by Louis the Great of Hungary-among which the most interesting is probably a small copy on parchment, painted by Maria Theresa. Her cult of St Stephen was especially conspicuous: she founded an order in memory of her apostolic predecessor, and re-established the cult of the Holy Dexter, Stephen's mummified right hand. According to the medieval legend, before his death Stephen offered his country to the protection of the Virgin Mary, and from then on the Patrona Hungariae, with the help of the Hungarian saints, was especially protective of the country. In the 17th century the main thrust of this idea went against the Turks, and its paradigmatic work of art was the picture above the altar of Hungarian saints in the Győr Jesuit church. In it the saints protect the country against Turkish arrows by holding up shields with the image of Mary.
The sixth section (Late Renaissance and Baroque Images of History) was a selection of profane images from the same period, from the ornate sepulchre of the hero of Szigetvár, Miklós Zrínyi, through manneristic allegories about the Fifteen-Year War, prepared for the Emperor Rudolf II, to Mausoleum (1664), which for centuries fixed the iconographic canon of Hungarian monarchs. Also displayed in this section were images of family history, with special reference to the enormously wealthy count Pál Esterházy, the homo novus who wanted to authenticate the antiquity and nobility of his family through the instrument of the fine arts as well.
The seventh section (Memory of Objects) called attention to how works of art can be used to manipulate the past. Here we displayed textile and goldsmith's work of fine quality which were attributed, rightly or wrongly, to famous historic personalities, as owners or donors. The monumental flask-shaped Gothic ceramics in the Esterházy treasury was related to King Matthias only in the 1940's, as it happens, incorrectly. The chasuble tailored from Matthias's throne tapestry was bought by Francis Joseph I for archbishops to wear at future coronations, as another token of the legitimacy of the Habsburgs' rule in Hungary.
The eighth room, in which we hang mirrors to make it hexagonal, an allusion to J. L. Borges's library of Babel, was devoted to the beginnings of scholarly activity, more precisely, to how, from the early 18th to mid-19th century, scholars began to collect pictorial sources: not merely the inscriptions on, but the representations of, tombstones, seals, archeological findings, buildings, etc. (Beginnings of Archeological Interest). Relics depicted ranged from the Roman Heidenthor of Carnuntum to such medieval objects as the mortuary crown of the Emperor Sigismund or the tombstone of the Bosnian king Miklós Újlaki. Images of history showed a development from "serious" representations (Mátyás Bél's edition illustrated with copperplate reproductions of the Pictorial Chronicle to pictures of fantasy, like a friar teacher's 1773 vision of the Huns-i.e., the Hungarians-leaving the Scythian homeland: in it a Bactrian camel is drawing a conical tent, that is, a yurt, installed on wheels. It was in the same room that we displayed forgeries made to exploit the trend of searching for a national identity: fake codices in bogus handwriting, phoney prayer books (in "Old" Hungarian), a chronicle with a publishing date of 1301, containing childish illustrations (and produced in the 19th century).
The ninth section was devoted to the artistic relics of the early-19th-century intellectual movement, "imperial patriotism" (Imperial Patriotism and Hungarian History). Intellectuals gathered around the Archduke Johann in Vienna tried to select those episodes from the histories of peoples living under Habsburg rule which were supposed to be able to enhance cohesion within the Empire. Such a Hungarian hero was Miklós Zrínyi, who died during the defence of Szigetvár against the Turks (this was when "the sortie of Zrínyi" became a favourite painting topic), or John of Hunyad, the "Turk crusher", who in this interpretation bore a striking resemblance to the Czech national hero, Jan Zizka.
The tenth section was composed of objects from the peripheries of art, almanac illustrations and works of applied arts (Pictures of History in the Sphere of Private Life in the mid-19th Century). We could even display a profane example of the relic cult: when the grave of Ferenc II Rákóczi was opened, shreds from the shroud were secured by Kálmán Thaly, a scholar of the Kuruc period of great renown (and author of fake Kuruc poems), and later placed in a reliquiary designed by Gyula Benczúr.
The eleventh was the gloomiest section of all (Images of a Nation's Calvary). After the suppression of the 1848-49 War of Independence, works representing tragic moments in Hungarian history started to appear in great numbers. Accordingly, in this room almost all pictures contained elaborate images of the dead or dying, or death-cell scenes. While this kind of historical painting had authenticity in the middle of the 19th century, by the early 20th century the genre had almost turned into a parody of itself; Viktor Madarász's oeuvre was in itself a compact example of this tendency. His late picture in which under an oppressive dark sky a dying Petőfi is inscribing the word "Liberty" in the dust with his own blood is as close to kitsch as one can get.
The next three sections (Allegorical History Painting in the 19th Century; Official Historical Representation; Places of Remembrance: the Cult of Monuments) were devoted to official images of history, mostly commissioned. The history of public monuments, their unveiling and destruction, from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, represented by photographs and fragments of the originals, gave an interesting insight into the history of the nation. The last great symbolic act was the toppling and dismembering of the huge Stalin statue in Budapest in 1956.
The last but one section (Anti-Historicism: the Past Escapes History) oresented examples of the various types of answers artists disillusioned with history (and historical painting) gave to questions concerning the past at the end of the 19th century. These were images of a Golden Age lost in the haze of myths, like Csontváry's ur-Hungarian myth, various modern torsos or Gyula Derkovits's Three Generations. The latter was painted in 1932, and served as a stepping stone into the contemporary section. After all, artists for the past few decades, perhaps more than ever before, have had definite views on the past. The works expressing these can be ironic, pathetic, allusive-a thousand different kinds. Opposite the exit stood György Jovánovics's life-size sculpture, Man, whose skin is covered with fleurs-de-lis, as if branded by history. Since the exit was opposite the entrance, Man was looking at the Janus-faced Sisters by Erzsébet Schaár guarding the entrance; the circuit was closed. The last section, that of modern works, bore the title Anti-historicism: Liberation of the Past from the Bonds of History. Looking back from that point, the whole exhibition, the work not only of artists but of researchers, appeared to be such a rescue operation. In the vestibule the visitor was greeted and bid farewell to by Béla Kondor's giant mural, The Judge, the Angel of Judgement holding a sharp knife between his teeth.
The 850-page catalogue accompanying the exhibition is the work of sixty scholars. The division of the volume follows that of the exhibition, adding forty studies to the detailed descriptions of 400 works of art. Eight out of the forty studies, by way of introduction, treat general questions, while the rest deal with phenomena that could not be presented at the exhibition in bodily form, but whose problems closely relate to the juxtaposition of image versus history." The lavishly illustrated volume (almost all exhibits are reproduced in colour or black-and-white photos) also has an index of names to make it more accessible. Also available are a German summary and list of exhibits and an illustrated English brochure which contains the introductory studies to each section). The volume, in effect a collection of studies, can be used independently of the exhibition, and it is hoped that it will influence and alter not only the public's view of the past but also the scholarly approach of art historians and scholars in related fields. Yet there is one thing no theory-however artfully presented-can achieve: to reproduce the personal experience one has in an exhibition room, right within the magnetic field of the original works of art.
Árpád Mikó
is Curator of the Old Hungarian Section of the Hungarian National Gallery.
