Catalogue of the Old Masters Gallery at the Christian Museum in Esztergom [antikvár]

The Christian Museum in Esztergom contains one of the most important old Hungárián collections; in fact, it is one of the country's richest museums of fine arts and applied arts. The founder, János Simor, Archbishop of Esztergom (1813-1891), opened it to the public in 1875. By the purchase in 1878 of fourteenth to sixteenth-century Italian paintings of the Bertinelli collection in Romé he raised the museum to an international level. He bequeathed his priváté collection-later to be known as the Christian Museum-to the Chapter of the Esztergom Cathedral. In the early 1920s the Museum received another significant bequest. The donor, Bishop Arnold Ipolyi (1823-1886), had initiated research into old Hungárián art; his collection, alsó rich in early Italian paintings, was added to the stock of the Christian Museum. The founder and patrons of the Esztergom museum alsó collected old Hungárián panel paintings. However, only a few works of the golden age of medieval Hungárián painting had survived the ravages of the Turkish occupation and of the following centuries. Thanks to two eminent Hungárián collectors of the nineteenth century, to the interest of János Simor and to the research of Arnold Ipolyi, the irreplaceable and perhaps most important paintings of early Hungárián art kept in Esztergom were saved. To Simor and Ipolyi we owe the creation of the first national gallery of ancient Hungárián painting in the Christian Museum, which today is the largest priváté collection of the country. It is administered by the Church and subsidized by the State. Its home is the Primate's Palace in Esztergom. The first catalogue of the works of art preserved in the Christian Museum of Esztergom was published in 1948, as the first volume in the Topography of Hungary's Historical and Artistic Monuments series. The late István Genthon and Tibor Gerevich, eminent researchers of old Hungárián art, undertook the systematic and scholarly registration of the Museum's entire stock. In a period of about fifteen years following the publication of the