Masterpieces of the Museum of Fine Arts [antikvár]

FOREWORD An irregular museum guide is presented here to the reader. One hundred and fifty-six reproductions have been selected from the approximately three thousand works of art housed in the collections of painting and sculpture of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. In order to handlé the collection successfully, the Museum is divided into three departments: the Old Masters' Gallery, the Modern Picture Gallery and the Department of Old Sculpture. But after all, it is a single collection that displays European works of arts from the late Middle Ages through to the present day. This selection, as any other anthology or selection, is arbitrary. To list the excluded works would take far more space than the description of the illustrated works themselves. Recently several albums, illustrated books and catalogues have been published on the different collections housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, which concern historical view points and deal with the history of the collection. We did not intend to create another book of this kind. The present selection, naturally representing the collection's most important and most outstanding works, does not display the works in a strictly historical, or chronological order. Our aim was to edit the illustrations to help the reader and the spectator to realise new relationships after they have walked through the Museum. The pictures placed on facing pages are related in form or content, or they are contrasting pieces. To see similar representations of the same subject, analogous or contrasting forms placed side by side, can be in itself an enlightening experience. This visual "puzzle", naturally, is put in the context of art history and may occasionally offer definitely interesting evidence. Not only did we adhere to the nature of the collection, but alsó to the classical arrangement of the exhibition halls, in that different national schools, up until the nineteenth-twentieth century, have been displayed separately. Due to the richness and peculiar character of the collection in Budapest, one can easily understand, for instance, the essentials of Venetian portrait painting by comparing Gentile Bellini to Giorgione or explain the hundred years' development of the Venetian school of painting with the help of an array of Enthroned Madonnas made in Venice during that long period. János Wilde, professor of the Courtauld Institute at London, who was of Hungárián origin, has taught several generations of art historians, that those who want to be acquainted with the complete development of European painting, should study the collection of the Budapest Museum. No one would say that our collection of painting, as regards the number of masterpieces, would rival with the galleries of Paris, Vienna, Leningrád or Washington, since those are either Royal collections or became national collections due to immense financial investment. The collection of art works housed in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts is the result of the activities of aristocratic, pontifical and bourgeois collectors. Prince Miklós Esterházy (1765-1833), with his conscious collecting policy, created an encyclopedic collection, imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and it reflects the taste of his own age. His aim was to represent each period and each national school of art. This encyclopedic character was completed by later collecting activities and remained the Museum's endeavour until today. Unfortunately there is little hope in filling somé gaps. Today it is