Pál Lővei
A Thousand Years on Display
Millennial Exhibitions
The year 2000 marked the thousandth anniversary of the crowning of the first king of the country, (Saint) Stephen I of the House of Árpád (d. 1038). This event is looked on as the founding of the Hungarian state. It took place at Christmas 1000 though some believe it was on the first day of the new millennium.
A few years ago Hungary celebrated the 1100th anniversary of what is literally called in Hungarian the landtaking, the conquest of the Carpathian basin, a conquest that started in 895 and took some years to complete. The 1000th anniversary of the Conquest, due to delays in preparation, was not celebrated in 1895 but in 1896, with the National Millennial Exhibition in Budapest, which was originally intended to be a World Fair. A century later Budapest wished to have another go at staging a World Fair and was to organize the 1995 event in conjunction with Vienna. When the Viennese withdrew, Hungarians decided to go it alone and hold the Budapest World Fair in 1996. The government which came into power in 1994 cancelled the project for financial reasons. After this retreat, still censured by some, the country focussed its attention on the 1996 anniversary, for which most museums organized, despite belated political and financial decisions, surprisingly successful exhibitions.
The majority of events in 2000 covered topics similar to those covered in 1996: there were exhibitions on medieval Hungary, primarily based on archeological finds (such as an exhibition in Győr, on the secular and religious centres of Győr-Sopron-Moson county in the North-West; or the exhibition presenting Veszprém in the age of the Árpád kings, when it was the coronation city of queens, including Gisela of Bavaria, wife to Stephen); ecclesiastic collections again exhibited their treasures (the Győr and Vác dioceses); there were programmes focussing on the past century (such as the Sopron exhibition casting an eye over the 20th-century history of the town); exhibitions devoted to more specialized topics; and medieval codices were again on display. Some exhibitions, however, reflected on the millennium by making time the central subject (an international trend) and abandoning a national or regional framework.
During the nineties, the Hungarian National Gallery presented a major exhibition each year, in spring or autumn, with a medieval, 19th or 20th-century focus. The opening of the annual Budapest Spring Festival, devoted to the arts, was often synchronized with the opening event at the Gallery. The 2000 programme was entitled "History-Image: Selected Examples of the Interplay between Past and Art in Hungary." The exhibition, which was arranged by Katalin Sinkó and Árpád Mikó, centred on material that was interesting, thought-provoking and varied in genre, from antiquity to the 1989-1990 transition. It represented not a particular period or oeuvre, but the whole timespan as studied by art historians in Hungary. Almost seventy people were involved and contributed data, studies and descriptions for the catalogue: archeologists, literary historians and historians, and some sixty art historians, the latter a representative selection of a somewhat narrow group of Hungarian scholars. All but four live in Budapest (the others in Esztergom, Miskolc, Pécs and Székesfehérvár) and this is illustrative of the situation in Hungary: there are hardly any art historians employed in provincial museums or other related institutions.
The exhibition must be considered a huge professional success. The massive catalogue, 851 pages of small print, features new findings in many fields first published here and, one hopes, will inspire new directions in Hungarian art history. Since the exhibition and the catalogue was the joint venture of scholars who rarely, if ever, collaborate, the event was indeed a special present for those engaged in art history, as it offered, through its study of the ever-changing relation of art and history, an opportunity to examine their own position with respect to their subject, history, and the history of their discipline.
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In "Sealed History," arranged by András Hegeduýs, director of the Primate's Archives, some 140 seals were on display from the period between the middle of the 12th century to the Battle of Mohács (1526), most in their original context, with the documents. In recent years Hungarian art historians have taken a new interest in seals, a fact that greatly aided the organization of this exhibition. The Primate's Archives, together with the Esztergom Chapter Archives, holds the second largest collection of medieval documents after the Hungarian National Archives, and this was the first time it was put on such a generous public display. Indeed, many of the seals of monarchs, popes, barons, major and minor ecclesiastical figures, chapters and convents, as well as of towns and cities, had not been available to the public before. Beside the wax impressions, there were also some gold and lead bulls. During the two months of the exhibition the Treasury had more than 43,000 visitors, the majority of whom presumably looked over the seals as well. School groups brought here were probably most impressed by a 1233 copy of the golden pendant seal of Andrew II (d. 1235), the nearest likeness to that which was used on a 1222 decree, known as the Golden Bull (after the seal itself). The Bull is often compared to England's Magna Carta and all seven original copies of it have been lost. Andrew II's bull was made of gold leaves soldered together, and the other gold seal at the exhibition, on a 1465 charter granted by King Matthias, is of solid gold.
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One of the most significant exhibitions of the millennial year was a joint Czech-Polish-Hungarian-German-Slovak event, "Europe's Centre Around 1000 A.D." It was declared the 27th Council of Europe Exhibition. Designed to be on the road for two years, the exhibition opened in the Budapest National Museum, in the autumn of 2000. It will move on to Berlin in the summer of 2001, to Mannheim in the autumn and winter, before finishing in Prague and Bratislava. The idea originated in the Deutsche Verbände für Altertumsvorschung and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. An international committee (with three Hungarian members) worked for three years on the programme outline, which was then passed on to national committees for them to work on such details as exhibits, borrowings, catalogues and studies. The Hungarian material was compiled by the Medieval Department of the National Museum, headed by Ernő Marosi, the chairman of the national committee.
Posters and tickets for the exhibition, as well as the front pages of books and booklets of studies and the huge billboard hung onto the front of the museum, showed an illustration from the Munich Gospel book of Otto III, in which three female figures pay homage to the Emperor. This is a somewhat modified version of the original image: in it there are four figures, Roma, Gallia, Germania and Sclavinia (that is, the Slav province, which is obviously Poland), so Gallia was left out, all of them crowned ladies, and the position of the names has also been changed. The illustration was well chosen; it is a pity visitors seeking the original source could only find a facsimile at the Budapest venue, in a knee-high display case.
Original or copy? The question was a central problem of the whole project. The catalogue tells at which venue an object is exhibited in the original. Apart from archeological finds, it seems that few of the delicate manuscripts, goldsmith's work and other treasures are to be displayed at all venues. Some are present, at all venues, in reproduction only. The Holy Roman Emperor's crown, the holy lance and the Attila sword cannot be moved out of the Vienna treasury, so they appear everywhere in reproduction. The Hungarian crown is represented with a copy in which the materials were identical in every respect (jewels, etc.) although the original is in Budapest, removed by a political decision from the National Museum to Parliament in the very year of the Millennium. Even politicians accepted the expert opinion that the coronation mantle could not be transported, so that stayed in the National Museum and took an important role in the exhibition. Size and difficulties of transportation account for plaster casts of a Gottland rune-stone, as well as of pillars and stone tables erected for Slavic pagan gods, and the marble relief of the Adalbert Well of S. Bartolomeo all'Isola in Rome. The bronze gates of the cathedrals in Mainz and Gniezno could simply not be removed. The oldest extant Slavic record, the Kiev Leaves, using the Glagolitic alphabet, produced in the early tenth century on Czech territory, as well as codices connected with the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius, were represented by facsimiles, the originals being in the Vatican, Kiev and Moscow. Also present in facsimile was the 1086 Vysehrad Codex, which had an important role at the coronation of the kings of Bohemia.
Codices, textiles and smaller works of art were given a particular treatment by organizers: different copies of manuscripts on the same topic, objects of a similar function and age were displayed at all venues, with their descriptions printed in succession in the catalogue. In this way, major works, occasionally chief works, of the period thus became interchangeable with their closest parallels. Sacramentaria from Lucca, Udine, Paris and Mayence, 11th and 12th-century copies of the Fulda Chronicles from Vienna and the Vatican Library; various versions of the legend of St Vincent from 10-12th-century codices; 10-11th-century pontificals from Wolfenbüttel, Schaffhausen and Aosta; Sacramentaria written in Fulda, from Göttingen, Vercelli, the Vatican Library and Münster; biographies of St Adalbert from Wolfenbüttel, Aachen and Admont. The exhibition's organizers carefully distributed the remnants of the library of the Emperor Otto III: from works collected for him in Piacenza and then kept in Bamberg, those included were a medical codex, which also contains the list of books, fragments of two rare volumes of Livy, tracts on natural history by Isidore of Seville and the Corpus Juris of the Emperor Justinian.
Applied arts items were grouped together, such as the sepulchral chalice of Bishop Gervase, made before 1067, an inscribed Byzantine onyx cup from the 10th or 11th century which belongs to the treasury of San Marco in Venice, and another piece made from agate. Similarly connected were portable altars from the Musée Cluny in Paris, from Bad Gandersheim and Paderborn; chalices with matching patens from Minden, Hildesheim and Siegburg; croziers associated with St Godehard, Reginbald and Servatius, from Niederalteich, Augsburg and Maastricht. The catalogue thus records an imaginary perfect, and at the same time virtual, exhibition-by combining half a dozen exhibitions operating on the principle pars pro toto and adding some extra relics.
The idea behind the "Europe's Centre Around 1000 A.D." exhibitions is somewhat narrow: it illustrates the missionary and political expansion of the Holy Roman Empire, and especially of the German territories, towards the Slavic and Hungarian states, to what would later become Central Europe, without making an attempt to demonstrate the influence of the Byzantine Empire, very important at the time, either on the Holy Roman Empire or the new kingdoms. (A few objects of Byzantine origin or influence are of course displayed.) Relations to Scandinavia or the Slavic nature of Eastern Europe were mentioned only tangentially, especially by reference to Kiev. This is how Arabs appear, with relics of their impact on the sciences, as for instance objects relating to the Spanish studies of Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II (945-1003), and to the work on astronomy of his learned followers, very important indeed for the evaluation of Arab influence.
The exhibition series is not without its political aspects, and not only because it is financially supported by the Council of Europe. As the organizers declare in the forewords of the publications, the aim was to document and illuminate the western integration of Central European countries from the perspective of art history, to represent links that have existed for a thousand years but which have grown imperceptible in the 20th century, and which have a new relevance through the expected EU membership of these countries. On the German side there was a belief that the idea of Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, the renewal of the Roman Empire, the work of Charlemagne, revived by Otto III, had originally included Central Europe as well, the king-doms of Hungary, Poland and Bohemia, then in process of formation. One cannot help feeling that France, which (apart from lending a few objects) is so conspicuously absent, may be resisting the political intention underpinned by this special interpretation of renovatio: Gallia is even absent from the poster, though around 1000 she symbolized the western provinces of the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and Lotharingia, along the rivers Meuse and Moselle.
As this review is written, the exhibition has already closed in Budapest but has not yet opened in Berlin, so we cannot tell how an "overindulged" German public will react to it. What is certain is that even the German version of this exhibition, which will presumably be richer in material, will not be able to compete with displays with a fabulous array of original exhibits such as "Ornamenta Ecclesiae" in Cologne in 1985, the Bernward Exhibition in Hildesheim in 1993, or the Carolingian Exhibition in Paderborn in 1999.
The Budapest exhibition was unfortunately not very attractively laid out. The installations were manufactured by the German organizers and are travelling with the exhibits. The designer apparently did not take into account the peculiarities of the National Museum. Showcases and display screens sometimes seemed lost in the interior, as on the corridor housing the entry to the exhibition, at other places they were jam-packed. In a West-European site the arrangers would surely have avoided the embarrassment of having all film projectors out of order by the second half of the duration, with no attempt made to get them in working order again. Thus the interactive room was available only for a short time after the exhibition opened.
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Pál Lővei
is an art historian at the National Board for the Protection of Historical Monuments.
Areas of research: medieval sepulchral art, heraldry, architectural history.
