An international traveling exhibition, which presents photographs of about fifty armorial letters from Transylvania, will arrive to Budapest this week. It is the result of research conducted by specialists of the Institute of History, University of Debrecen and the Faculty of History and Philosophy, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca. The project was coordinated by Tamás Szálkai, whose book on this subject was published in 2009. The armorials date from the period of the Principality Transylvania, and were donated by Princes of Transylvania to various noblemen.
The exhibition will open at the Budapest History Museum on January 19th, 2011. For that day, and entire conference has been organized on the subject of Coat of arms and society in medieval and early modern Hungary. You can read the conference program here, and you can read more about the exhibition here.
There is an entire website dedicated to the program, unfortunately only in Hungarian - visit Armales Transylvanorum for more information.
I think it would be so interesting to watch how great land owning families like the Esterházys rose to cultural importance. Aristocratic families really did have wealth and power, but more important from my perspective was their role in the arts, music, literature and science. If they did NOTHING else except patronise Haydn and Beethoven, it would have been worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteWell, at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, all the 16-17th century luxury textiles from the Esterházy treasury are currently on view!
ReplyDelete