Monograph on the Hungarian Angevin Legendary published by CEU Press

The long-awaited English edition of the monograph on the Hungarian Angevin Legendary, written by Béla Zsolt Szakács, has finally been published by CEU Press in Budapest. 

The Hungarian Angevin Legendary is perhaps the most important illuminated manuscript connected to the Angevin rulers of Hungary. It is a painted legendary, which in its current fragmentary state presents 58 legends (including the life of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary) on lavishly illuminated pages. Each page contains four scenes from the lives of the saints, and the images are only accompanied by short captions. The largest part of what remained of the codex was bound together in the eighteenth century in a volume housed in the Vatican Library. Some of the missing pages, often incomplete, have found their way into collections from the United States to Russia - most of the pages being preserved at the Morgan Library.

As of today, altogether 142 leaves from the Legendary (some of them fragmentary) are known in six different collections of the world. Since the digitization of the codex Vat. lat. 8541 by the Vatican Library, images of every page are available online (I have collected all the pictures on Pinterest). It is possible that some other fragments will come to light, as the original number of folios is estimated at 176. The quality of its execution and its sheer size indicate that the manuscript must have been a royal commission, and its iconography – rich in Hungarian and Angevin saints – suggests it was created for the court of the Hungarian Angevin kings.

Scene from the Legend of St. Ladislas
(Vatican Library)

The monograph provides a detailed analysis of the image cycles contained in the dispersed manuscript: it provides a reconstruction of the original manuscript, analyses the different narrative of saints and their arrangement, and explains the significance of certain narratives. The book analyses the system of selecting and arranging the legend within the book, and also deals with the structure of the individual narrative cycles. Another part focuses on image types recurring in the lives of several saints.

The book was originally published in 2006 in Hungarian. The English edition has been updated, among others with additional bibliographical references, and it also contains a much higher number of illustrations than the original version. The new volume was presented by Ernő Marosi at CEU on June 23, 2016. The book is available at the publisher as well as at any good bookseller. 

Scenes from the Life of St. Alexis. The State Hermitage Museum

Scenes from the Life of St. Francis. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Béla Zsolt Szakács (PhD 1998) is head of the Department of Art History at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and associate professor of the Department of Medieval Studies at CEU, also contributing to the Cultural Heritage Program. He has been active in a CEU research project focusing on the visual resources of medieval East Central Europe in the framework of which he was extensively dealing with the Hungarian Angevin Legendary. His major research fields are Christian iconography, medieval architecture in Central Europe and the history of monument protection.

Bibliographical data: Béla Zsolt Szakács: The Visual World of the Hungarian Angevin Legendary (Central European Cultural Heritage Series, Volume I.). Budapest: CEU Press, 2016 (350 pages, 142 color illustrations, ISBN 978-963-7326-25-7)

Every surviving part of the manuscript is available online, please use the links below:

Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 8541

New York, The Morgan Library, M.360.1-26

St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paris, Musée du Louvre (more information on this leaf here)

Berkeley, The Bancroft Library

Collected studies of András Péter published

Last December marked the 70th anniversary of the death of art historian András Péter. He was a noted scholar of Italian Trecento painting, as well as of Hungarian medieval art. Born in 1903, he studied in Budapest and defended his doctorate in 1925. The subject of his dissertation was the representation of Hungarian holy kings in medieval art. Later he published a series of important articles on key figures of Italian Trecento painting, especially on Sienese masters such as the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini. Material for these studies was collected during his research trips to Italy, most notably through a grant at the Hungarian Historical Institute in Rome (1926-27). In 1930, he published a ground-breaking survey of the history of Hungarian art. In 1935, he became a tutor at the art history department of Tibor Gerevich at Budapest University (named after Péter Pázmány at the time, and now known as Eötvös Loránd University).

His monograph on Italian Trecento painting, however, remained unfinished, and was published posthumously in 1983. Now a new volume has appeared, which contains the collected studies of András Péter. Edited by Mária Prokopp and Károly Tóth, the book republishes his writings in chronological order, starting with his dissertation, which was previously only available in manuscript form. Several of these studies were published in international journals, and are considered important contributions to this day. 

Below are some of his studies which can be consulted online:

Pietro és Ambrogio Lorenzetti egy elpusztult freskó-ciklusa = Ein verlorener Freskenzyklus der Brüder Lorenzetti. In: Az Országos Magyar Szépművészeti Múzeum Évkönyvei = Jahrbücher des Museums der Bildenden Künste in Budapest VI. 1929-1930. (1931). 52-81. 256-260.

Quand Simone Martini est-il venu en Avignon? In: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 81 (1939), 153-174. 

Giotto and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. In: The Burlington Magazine, LXXVI (1940), No. 442. 3-8. (via JSTOR)

His full bibliography can also be consulted online, as compiled by the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts.

András Péter (1903-1944)

András Péter's career was cut short by the Holocaust. He stayed in Budapest even during the German occupation of Hungary and during the rule of the Arrow Cross. He was arrested by the Arrow Cross, and killed on December 9th, 1944. Sadly, he was not the only important art historian who fell victim to the Holocaust in Hungary. We should mention first of all his friend, György Gombosi, another noted scholar of Italian early renaissance art, who died in Auschwitz in early 1945. Others include József Bíró, an eminent historian of art in Transylvania, who was shot into the Danube together with his elderly father at the beginning of 1945 (see here his monograph on palaces in Transylvania); and art critic Artúr Elek, who committed suicide after Germany occupied Hungary in 1944. A friend of Ernst Gombrich, József Bodonyi, who had studied with Julius von Schlosser in Vienna and wrote his dissertation on the origin of gold background in Late Antique painting, also died in 1944 after returning to Hungary. A generation of (mostly Jewish) Hungarian art historians had already emigrated from Hungary after 1919 including Johannes Wilde, Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Charles de Tolnay. We should also mention Jenő Lányi, who only spent his childhood in Hungary, as he studied in Vienna and Munich. A scholar of Jacopo della Quercia and Donatello, he finally emigrated to London in 1938, and died as a casualty of a German torpedo attack in 1940 on his way to the US.