Fifteenth century german and bohemian panel paintings [antikvár]

ollowing the monumental murai art of Romanesque style, the glass painting of Early Gothic cathedrals and miniatűré painting so warmly favoured by courtly culture, medieval panel painting, an interesting and attractive field in the history of Germán art, aspired to the proud rank of leadership. Born on small-size diptychs and portable altars, it became the progenitor of the vast realm of easel pictures with an extensive province of themes, the forerunner of the portrait, the stilllife, of genre-painting, in generál of all the motives that were to appear again and again in frescoes of loftily solemn tone without having a proper place of their own. The aristocratic art of miniatűré painting was inaccessible to the wider public, leaving its demand for the spectacular unsatisfied. While gazing at major altarpieces, at the triptychs gleaming with gold and colours in the dim glimmer inside Gothic churches, people found ample opportunities for enjoying new representations of century-old sacred themes painted in a life-like manner after the intense, veritably naturalist conception of the Late Middle Ages, virtually dividing the picture into series of scenes fully comprehensible to the spectator. This demand was manifest in occasional details of the genre-scene type to be discovered in a fair number of pictures, the arrangement of minor utensils to form a complete still-life, the portrait-like verisimilitude of somé figures; these were to become the preshaped elements of artistic forms destined to emerge later and to acquire independence. In the fifteenth century panels were painted almost exclusively for the Church, though it was the time when individual portraits were beginning to be painted, and a few secular allegories are alsó encountered. The pieces to be found in the richest Hungárián collections at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and the Esztergom Christian Museum had all been altarpieces or epitaphs. They are few in number, since public opinion woke up very late to value their beauty; only in the first half of the nineteenth century, as a result of Romanticism and its stimulating cult of the Middle Ages. A considerable part came into the possession of the then young National Museum from the collection of Miklós Jankovich, one of the most versatile and successful collectors of the Hungárián intellectual revival which marks the first half of the past century. The activities of prelates as collectors-e.g. the bishop