Hungarian silver on sale in NYC

Nautilus cup
Nagyszeben, mid-17th century 

About 30 precious silver and goldsmith works from Hungary and Transylvania will be auctioned off at Christie's New York tomorrow (17 May 2011). (Sale 2447: Important English, Continental and American Silver and Gold). The pieces in question are all Renaissance and Baroque works, mainly dating from the 17th century. Before WWII, the objects all belonged to the Herzog collection. The collection of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, a wealthy Jewish magnate in Budapest was one of the largest of its time in Hungary, which got largely dispersed during the war. The silver objects in the collection were last fully documented in a 1930 inventory, and most of the pieces were on view for the last time at various exhibitions at Budapest's Museum of Applied Arts at around that time. The pieces have been recorded as wartime victims of looting, and their whereabouts were unknown until this sale.

The New York Times also wrote on the sale, and has this to say about the provenance of the objects, based on a telephone interview with the anonymous seller: "a Herzog family member had managed to bring the pieces to New York at some point. The family had long kept them in storage."

You can browse the objects on the website of Christie's, where a full e-catalogue and a slideshow of objects is also avaliable. When browsing the auction catalogue, the lots in question go from Lot 99 to 127 + lot 132.

17th century pendant with St. George  

Many objects from the Herzog collection are of course embroiled in restitution cases. Record-setting pieces, like the recently restituted portrait of Sigismund Baldinger by Georg Pencz have come to the market from the collection (Christie's sale 7862 of last year). Currently there is a major lawsuit going on, as heirs of the Herzog family sued the Hungarian state for objects kept in various Hungarian public collections. The emergence of these Hungarian silver objects among these circumstance is definitely most interesting.

Nevertheless, after the best pieces of the Salgó collection entered the Metropolitan Museum, it would be nice to see these pieces stay together as well, and - preferably - enter a public collection.

New blog on Medieval Poland + Master Paul of Levoča

I would like to report that a new art blog - quite similar in nature to my own venture - was started with a focus on medieval Poland. The blog provides brief news about new books, exhibitions and discoveries in the field of medieval art and medieval studies in Poland. You can find the bilingual (Polish/English) blog at this address: http://medievalpoland.blogspot.com/

I am immediately lifting one news item from the blog, concerning a new book which is of course quite relevant for the study of art in medieval Hungary as well. To quote the Medieval Poland blog (with one correction and):

"The Cracow publishing house DodoEditor has released Zoltán Gyalókay's monograph on the Master Paul of Levoča. The late medieval sculpture of Master Paul of Levoča certainly deserves more attention in international scholarly literature. His workshop has produced altars for churches Szepes (Spis) county and neighboring regions. The high craftsmanship of his works and the influence they had on contemporary artists has been studied by Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak scholars. This monograph represents the author’s long-term study of the artist’s oeuvre."

I might add that the sculptor worked in Lőcse (germ: Leutschau, now Levoča, Slovakia) at the beginning of the 16th century, where he was responsible for carving statues and reliefs for the main altar, among other things. His workshop also supplied altarpieces for other towns in Upper Hungary. The website of St. James's church provides an overview of the medieval furnishings of the parish church of Lőcse - in addition to the main altar of St. James, also check out the altar of the Nativity.

You can read more on the book on the website of the publisher, while a brief summary is available on the AHICE website (click here for direct link to pdf summary). Of course it is hoped that the book will also be available in a German/English or even Hungarian version!

Art and Architecture around 1400 Conference

As Medievalists around the US (the world?) are gearing up for this year's Medieval Congress at K'zoo, yours truly will drive over to neighboring Slovenia, to participate at the CIHA Colloquium at Maribor, titled Art and Archicture around 1400: Global and Regional Perspectives. I've gotten to like these more focused conferences, as discussions often tend to be livelier. The conference was organized by the University of Maribor, and by the Slovene Art History Society, under the auspices of a really distinguished Program Committee.

The six-day program of the conference is quite rich, with a number of interesting excursions aside from the talks, for example to see frescoes by the workshop of Johannes Aquila. 

Naturally, there will be a sizable Hungarian delegation at the conference, and a lot of Hungarian medieval topics will be treated in lectures and posters. A conference report with pictures will likely appear on this blog some time later. For now, a number of pictures of Slovenia's rich Gothic heritage can be seen in this gallery (the statue of St. James to the left is from the pilgrimage church of Ptujska Gora).


Update:
Gothic frescoes in Slovenia, photos from earlier this week on Flickr http://t.co/FoOXlx2

Update2:
The website of the conference above is no longer available, so the links above don't work any more.

Detail views of Salgó chalices at the Metropolitan

The Metropolitan Museum has just made available a number of detail photographs of the two medieval chalices which had recently entered the museum from the Salgó collection. Both chalices date from the mid-15th century, and are decorated with a special technique very popular in late medieval Hungary: the so called filigree-enamel. In this special variation of the cloisonné enamel, the fields of enamel are applied inside loops and shapes of filigree wire attached to the surface of the objects. You can read about medieval enameling techniques in this article (pdf) by David Buckton of the British Museum.

The two chalices are now described on the Metropolitan website as of "Central European" origin. However, the technique and details of both chalices - which can be studies on these photographs - makes their Hungarian origin quite certain - there is plenty of comparative material available, such as this chalice. More information could be gleaned from the coat of arms on the foot of one chalice, and the inscription on the cup of the other.

These are the links to the object pages:

Chalice from 1462

Mid-15th c. chalice with coat of arms

I wrote about the Salgó collection before in two previous posts.

Medieval treasure discovered in Wiener Neustadt

Belt buckle from the Wiener Neustadt treasure 

An important cache of medieval goldsmith works was found a few years ago, it was announced last week. The treasure was found by a man digging in his backyard in Wiener Neustadt. He, however, only took an interest in the objects quite recently, finally bringing them to the Austrian Office of Monument Preservation. On Friday it was reported that about 200 pieces were found - rings, brooches, other jewels, most apparently dating from the 13th-14th century.


Currently no detailed information is available on the find, but several pictures are already circulating on the internet. The image on the left is from this report by Der Standard, but the same photos released by the Bundesdenkmalamt have been published in many other places. The Austrian weekly profil was the first to report on the find, and The Associated Press also reported on the treasure - finally the story was picked up by several news outlets worldwide. The Bundesdenkmalamt of Austria will provide more details at a press conference on May 2nd.

The author of this blog of course would like to know whether any of the objects can be identified as of Hungarian origin.

Update: here is the report on the press conference of the Bundesdenkmalamt, where some of the objects were put on display.

The secret of the casket

Photos by Melange Galéria, Budapest 

A small Italian Renaissance casket went on display earlier this month in a Budapest gallery. The display was opened by Mária Prokopp, university professor and a noted expert of Italian Renaissance painting. So far not much is known about the intriguing object, the website of the gallery only says this much about it:

"This is the first public appearance of this precious Renaissance casket, which had been serving as a medicine case in the household of an elderly lady for the last 30 years."

The small casket (about 50 cm wide) is decorated with a well-composed Renaissance painting on the front, and two coat of arms on the shorter sides. The main scene seems to be some kind of triumphal or marriage procession - and is in very bad condition. Some small areas have already been cleaned, to reveal the original bright colors. The details are very fine, like in a manuscript illumination. The coats of arms on the sides seem rather general - an eagle and a lion. On the back side, there is an inscription fitting for the object, which reads: "Quod ut custoditorum me nemo sciat" (No-one shall know what is guarded by me).

It is clear that the casket is in need of restoration and detailed examination. It is hard to say more about it, until that happens. A series of photographs can be seen on the website of the gallery, plus here is a detail of the painting from the front of the casket. Renaissance experts - feel free to comment!

Earliest Christian church of Transylvania found at Gyulafehérvár

Traces of the oldest church of Transylvania

Photo from www.kronika.ro 

New archaeological research near the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia, Romania, the seat of the bishopric of Transylvania) led to the discovery of the remains of the semicircular apse of a medieval church. Archaeologists believe this is Transylvania’s oldest church, built around the year 1000 - thus before the foundation of the diocese in 1009 (see my previous post on the history of the cathedral). The remains were found at a depth of only one meter, 24 meters away from the Catholic Cathedral of St. Michael. Daniela Marcu Istrate, well-known archaeologist announced in a press conference on April 18 that the newly discovered church might have been built either by prince Gyula or by Saint King Stephen. Around 952, Gyula was baptized in Constantinople, and upon his return was given a bishop named Hierotheos who accompanied him back to Hungary - so if the church dates to the period of prince Gyula, it was built for the Byzantine rite (of course we are before the Great Schism of 1054 at this time). Besides the apse, archaeologists have also discovered several tombs dating back to the 12th century. However, experts believe that the church was already destroyed at that time. For the moment, work at the archaeological site has been suspended for lack of funds. The remains of the apse will be preserved provisionally.

Most interesting about this find is that it is not connected to the present 13th century cathedral - or its 11th century predecessor - in any way. The archaeologist proposes that this feature means that the new Roman Catholic cathedral was deliberately distanced from the earlier structure built for the Greek rite.

You can read more about the discovery in Hungarian or in Romanian.

It is worth noting that the town - Roman Apulum - has an even older history: lately, more and more Roman remains have also come to light, see here.