The angels of Pius V

The original location in the Vatican of Szeged’s Annunciation Galleria Comunale di Arte Contemporanea, arezzo

MúzeumCafé 22.

To mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of the noted Italian architect and writer Giorgio Vasari, Arezzo is hosting an exhibition entitled Vasari, the painter and engineer between 27 August and 11 December this year. The Móra Ferenc Museum in Szeged is lending its painting The Annunciation, which has been in its collection for 85 years (see MúzeumCafé 6). It is noteworthy that Szeged alone has one section of the formerly four-part panel. The museum’s inventory first recorded the work as The Immaculate Conception in 1925. The tondo, whose master had been disputed, is a work of the Florentine School and from 1896 was part of the Enyedi-Zsótér collection comprising 118 works of art. The wealthy Szeged couple János Lukács Enyedi (Eisenstädter) (1845-1906) and his wife Ilona Sarolta Zsótér (1852–1922) were the painting’s second known owners in Hungary and it was in their possession for 26 years. After their death it was acquired by Szeged’s Somogyi Library and Town Museum where it can still be found as part of the permanent art exhibition. The international ‘rediscovery’ of the masterpiece three years ago was accompanied by provenance research both locally and in Budapest. Scientific interest and the attention of the media began in late 2007 when Tamás Szabó, then head of the Fine Art Department of the Móra Ferenc Museum, proposed the restoration and art historical research of one of the nicest cinquecento panels in the collection so that it could be exhibited at the large-scale international exhibition presenting the art treasures of five centuries entitled …and God saw that it was good. In addition to a closed tender for restoration, the Szeged museum first called on Hungarian experts to determine the tondo’s master. By the autumn of 2009 the American professor of art history Louis Alexander Waldman attested the Vasari thesis first raised by Vilmos Tátrai at the end of 2007 with convincing documents. The Szeged museum might have reached the end of the international attribution project. However, research did not stop following Waldman’s attestation, which raised new questions concerning certain details. The museum wanted to learn about the former chapel which had housed the masterpiece and its presumed location in the chapel. The early results did not answer everything but were still significant, though the fate of the accompanying panels is still unknown. However, today the architectural appearance of the former private chapel of Pius V (1504-1572) on the 4th floor of the so-called Pius Tower (Torre Pia) in the Vatican Palaces, which was transformed in the middle of the 19th century, can be appreciated from photographs. Thus with the use of computer technology what The Annunciation as a decoration of the chapel may have looked like 440 years ago can be reconstructed. Later the Szeged museum received the following encouraging message from Ádám Somorjai, Benedictine father of Pannonhalma working as an archivist of the curia at the Papal Secretariat: “I’m looking into the Torre Pia issue. I happen to be working where it once used to be but by now has been pulled down.”