French review of Hungarian art history books

As I wrote on this blog before, a number of books were published on Hungarian medieval wall-painting in recent years. A French researcher of medieval Hungarian painting, Marie Lionnet wrote a detailed and knowledgeable review of some of these publications, which was published in the journal of the French Institute of Art History, Perspective. Books reviewed include the Festschrift to Ernő Marosi, the book of Mihály Jánó on the research history of medieval wall painting in Transylvania - which was mention in this blog post before - as well as two books to which I contributed (and wrote about here).

Marie Lionnet wrote her doctoral dissertation on late medieval wall painting in the Kingdom of Hungary, you can read a pdf version of her conclusions here.

The full text of the journal Perspective is only available on a subscription basis. Thanks to the kindness of the author, and with permission of the publisher, I am able to provide the full text of the review, which you can access by clicking here. (This will open in Google docs - you might want to save a PDF copy for easier reading).

Full citation for the article is as follows:

Marie Lionnet: "Histoire de la peinture médiévale dans le royaume de Hongrie", dans Perspective, La revue de l'INHA, 2010/2011-2, décembre 2010, p. 384-389 (http://www.inha.fr/spip.php?rubrique259)

Blogging tools I use

My Flavors.me page 

I started this blog in August, so about 6 months ago. In this short time, Blogger stats recorded well over 10.000 page views here, which I consider very good for a blog with a somewhat obscure topic. I originally started this blog as an extension of my website on the art of medieval Hungary, essentially in order to replace the News section of the website (which I rarely updated). That website has been up and running for almost 15 years, and received many, many visitors. Today, the website and the blog are closely linked - all this works automatically thanks to a little tool called Feed Informer, which lists most recent content of this blog on the website. This is very neat, as now I never have to edit the news page - yet the content keeps refreshing.

In order to help readers find my blog - realizing that not everyone uses RSS feeds or Google Reader - I got a number of smart tools to work, which share all new content on social networks. First I registered at NetworkedBlogs - this service automatically posts updates to Facebook and Twitter. Oh yes, I also started a Twitter account, which proved to be one of the most important sources of traffic to my blog. As all these services were linking directly to individual posts, I also installed a LinkWithin widget, which helps readers get to other posts as well.

There are two more services I use, both of which required a few minutes to set up, and now work on their own. First is a very nice platform for creating personal websites, called Flavors.me. The website aggregates my blog and Twitter feeds, and also photos I uploaded to Picasa web albums and Flickr. Worth a try. The other service is a very interesting tool, called Paper.li. It automatically creates an online newspaper from Twitter posts I selected, so I set up a list following Twitter accounts focusing on medieval art - thus the Medieval Art Weekly was created.

Well, there was not much about medieval art in today's post - but if you follow some of the links above, you will get to a few interesting sites, and I hope that you keep following and reading the Medieval Hungary blog.

The Salerno Ivories

I posted an image from the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (Budapest) on Flickr today - a nice and small ivory panel showing the Creation of birds and fish.  I detected from responses that there is some interest in the piece - hence this brief post on the Salerno ivories. Together with its companion piece at the Metropolitan Museum, the plaque comes from the cathedral of Salerno and dates from about 1080-1084.  About fifty such plaques survive, all of which once decorated a large piece of church furnishing, such as an altar or reliquary. The panels depict biblical scenes from the Old and New Testament.

The plaque from Budapest traveled back to Salerno for an exhibition in 2007-2008. Titled "The Enigma of the Medieval Ivories from Salerno", the exhibition aimed to gather as many of these original pieces as possible (most of course are preserved to this day at the Museo Diocesano at Salerno). You can learn a lot more about the ivories by visiting the website of the exhibition. Photos of the individual ivory plaques are also available on the website of photographer Roberto Bigano. A two-day workshop at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, held in 2009, launched an ongoing research project dedicated to these ivories. So, expect to hear more about them in the near future!

(If, on the other hand, you would like to know more about the Museum of Applied Arts, you can follow the new Twitter account of the museum).

New medieval art websites, III.

I will keep this post very short - there seems to be an ever richer selection of medieval art websites out there. I just want to point out a few I've recently discovered.

The Utrecht Psalter 

Medieval manuscripts in Dutch collections

"This database contains descriptions of all medieval western manuscripts up to c. 1550 written in Latin script and preserved in public and semi-public collections in the Netherlands. These include the collections of libraries, museums, archives, collections of monastic orders and some private institutions open to researchers."

Arthur - La légende du roi Arthur

An online exhibition with copious illustrations from medieval manuscripts. Made by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with direct links to Gallica, the 'Bibliothèque numerique' of the BnF, providing full digital versions of medieval manuscripts.

Reliquary with the Man of
 Sorrows,
The Walters Art Museum 

Treasures of Heaven: Saints, relics, and devotion in Medieval Europe

This exhibition, previously shown in Cleveland, is now going to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. A brand new website has been created for this occasion, which contains really nice things, such as 3D photographs of several objects - photos where you can rotate and zoom in the objects. "The exhibition features over 130 sculptures, paintings and manuscripts, gathered from world-class collections, including the Louvre and the Vatican." For us in Europe, the exhibition will be available this summer at the British Museum in London.

Duccio: Rucellai Madonna
Florence, Uffizi 

Finally, I would just like to mention a great new project, which created quite a buzz on Twitter: The Google Art Project, with virtual tours (streetview style) of several major museums worldwide. You can also browse (and zoom) works in the artwork viewer module.
Description from the website: "Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces."

Well, go ahead, and explore!






See previous installations of this feature: Medieval Art websites part I and part II.

New book on the frescoes of Johannes Aquila

Johannes Aquila was a painter from the town of Radkersburg in Styria, working in the last quarter of the 14th century. Frescoes by him (or by his workshop) survive in altogether five churches in the area which used to be the border region of Styria and Hungary. Today two of those places: Mártonhely (Martjanci) and Bántornya (Turnisce) are in Slovenia. His earliest known work is in the small church of Velemér, dating from 1378. Latest works of Johannes Aquila's workshop are closer to his hometown in Austria:  at the church of the Augustinian hermits in Fürstenfeld. One interesting secular fresco cycle at Radkesburg was also painted by the workshop (at the Pistorhaus). The style of his workshop is characterized by a mixture of Italian and Bohemian elements.

Johannes Aquila is most famous for not only signing his work, but also for painting his self-portrait. The self-portrait can be seen next to his signature, in a praying position (similarly to depictions of patrons) both at Velemér (1378) and at Mártonhely (1392). These are regarded as the oldest European self-portraits by a painter, and you can read more about in an article by Daniel Spanke (Spanke, Daniel, "Die ältesten Selbstbildnisse Europas? Zur Bedeutung der Malerdarstellungen Johannes Aquilas von Radkersburg in Velemér (1378) und Martjanci (1392) für eine Frühgeschichte des Porträts," Zbornik za umetnostno zgodonivo 34 (1998), 141-159, available in a pdf format).

A new book has just been published on this highly important painter, written by Terézia Kerny with photographs by Zoltán Móser (Kerny, Terézia - Móser, Zoltán: Képet öltött az Ige - Johannes Aquila freskói. Budapest, Kairosz, 2010). The book will be presented by Mária Prokopp on Tuesday, January 25 at Litea Literature & Tea Bookshop. The book is in Hungarian, but hopefully will be published in other languages as well.

I cannot post my own photos of the frescoes here, because the last time I visited these churches I still used slides - and those have not been scanned yet. To the left, you can see the self-portait of Johannes Aquila from Mártonhely (Martjanci), and you can find several other photos online, especially of Velemér:

Photos of the church, with Quicktime virtual reality views of the interior; more photos at the Fine Arts in Hungary website.

For more photos, visit the IMAREAL database of the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters at Krems (search for Künstler: Johannes von Aquila [um 1400 tätig], or for Standorte: Turnisce and Martjanci. Does not seem to work in Chrome).

Medieval manuscripts at the National Library

A page from the 14th century Bible
of 'Weceslaus dictus Ganoys'
National Széchényi Library 

The National Széchényi Library preserves Hungary's largest repository of medieval manuscripts, and it is also an important research center in this field. On Monday, January 24th 2011, a series of lectures will be held about various medieval manuscripts and early printed books.The detailed program of these sessions can be studied on the blog of the National Library (in Hungarian). Lectures will be given by researchers working at the library, as well as by art historian Ernő Marosi.

If you would like to know more about the medieval holdings of the library, the 1940 catalogue of Latin medieval manuscripts is available online (Emma Bartoniek: Codices Latini Medii Aevi), to be found among the databases of the National Library (go to Kézirattár). Also, there is a lot of information available on the Bibliotheca Corviniana, as I wrote in a previous post and also on my website. Most important resource is the Bibliotheca Corviniana Digitalis. For other early Hungarian books, you might want to look at another website of the library, dedicated to the earliest Hungarian linguistic records (the full website is largely in Hungarian).

Armales Transylvanorum

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.