Hungarian Drawings and Water-Colours [antikvár]

,mmYmmmmm TWELFTH THROUGH EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES The chronicles of Hungarian art have come down to us in a fragmentary form. The unceasing wars with the Turks and struggles against the Hapsburg oppression which followed upon the Turkish occupation, tore out some of the richest pages of medieval art history and prevented the very formation of the chapters on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like a burning wedge, the conquering Turks thrust into the heart of the country, devastating with fire and sword the art relics of the past in just the richest, the central part of Hungary. Thus, practically only the relics of the unoccupied borderlands were spared—areas which, since 1920, are largely Austrian, Czechoslovakian and Rumanian territory. Drawings, which are the most perishable and the most easily lost, suffered hardest from this large-scale destruction. The sporadic pages of the history of Hungarian drawing are divided by gaps of several centuries. The Islamic subjugation, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, not only laid waste the flourishing medieval life of the country but interrupted the progress of Hungarian art and made virtually all forms of artistic life impossible for centuries to follow. In Hungary, struggling in the shadow cast by the Txirkish crescent from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly any artists to be found. Those there were fled panic-struck from the land which had become a theatre of war. No independent Hungarian art survived these times, apart from the work of local masters, meeting the occasional demand by producing coats of arms, altars, portraits or banners. Even these were active only in the territories unoccupied by the Turks: in the narrow strips of the West and North which were under Hapsburg rule, and in the Hungarian Principality of Transylvania, a dependency of the Turks. Hungarian artists did their work outside of the country and became a part of foreign artistic life. Even in the eighteenth century, when fighting had come to an end, the position of the arts did not undergo any essential change. The atmosphere prevailing in Hungary continued to force Hungarian artists to find their livelihood abroad. The utterly devastated country, levelled to the ground, needed a hundred years to recover. In the course of the century, the demand for art made itself increasingly felt in Hungary, but no one was found to satisfy it. The Hungarian painters were working abroad and the patrons of art—members of the aristocracy and the dignitaries of the Church—failed to contact them. Instead, foreign artists were invited to Hungary. The activity of these artists, however, had no influence upon the development of Hungarian art. It is only since the beginning of the nineteenth century that the history of Hungarian art has become a coherent and continuous text.