Each artwork is a window onto the past

Art historian, Professor Andrea De Marchi came to Budapest for the launch of a book. He took over the Department of Art History at the University of Florence from Hungarian researcher MiklósBoskovits (1935–2011) after the latter had retired. The conversation touched on the usefulness of blockbuster exhibitions, the situation of old masters in the art trade, and the 15th and 16th century hidden treasures in Hungary’s public collections. After all, highly valuable works can be found for a researcher from Tuscany in Esztergom’s Christian Museum as much as in the Museum of Fine Arts, where in a lecture Professor De Marchi drew attention to the book Corpus of Sienese Paintings 1420–1510 by DóraSallay.

In Siena, where De Marchi studied, the university’s high standard went together with a small number of students which made for a friendlier relationship between lecturer and students. In those years medieval art history was taught by the noted expert, Professor Luciano Bellosi, who was very much suited to that type of ‘conversational’ style. In addition, the university town with its almost intact medieval centre was also a reason for studying in Siena. The intactness had sad historical reasons. The town, which had been an international centre of the arts, fell victim to the expansionary politics of Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici I in the 16th century and stopped developing. The harmony characterising the relationship between Siena and its surroundings is also special. What the focal points of De Marchi’s future work with respect to time and geography would be were actually determined there during his studies. He did not write his theses about a Siena theme, but the Gothic painting of a nearby region, Marche. It was considered a relatively ‘small topic’ and was in conformity with Bellosi’s guidance that one should not first attempt a formidable task, rather smaller projects. At the same time, that research led to the theme of his doctoral dissertation, the oeuvre of Gentile da Fabriano. The study was later published as a book, which has had several editions.

After graduation he began working at the monument protection inspectorate in Pisa, which was followed by university lectureships in various towns such as Lecce and Udine. It was exactly 10 years ago when he returned to Tuscany, more exactly to Florence, when MiklósBoskovits asked him to take his post at the university there, since he was retiring.

Besides being a full-time university lecturer, he is also active in all the fields of his profession: research, writing, curating and consultation.

Professor De Marchi regards today’s overabundance of exhibitions as harmful, yet he also sees that it is difficult to avoid from a financial and business perspective. There is a double danger: it can divert attention from the other tasks of museums, and constant transport can be dangerous or even cause irreparable damage, especially in the case of old, often fragile artworks which may not be in perfect condition. Of course, there are also examples showing that
a thoroughly prepared and high-standard exhibition can give a huge impetus to the general interest in a given period or artists, as well as to academic research. For example, the large-scale exhibition devoted to Baroque painting in Florence in 1922, which presented more than a thousand works, urged several prominent art historians, including Roberto Longhi, to research Italian Baroque art. The exhibitions about the trecento in Bologna (1950) and of Caravaggio in Milan (1951), both curated by Longhi, can also be mentioned among the good examples. They facilitated research and at the same time were highly popular. These two requirements should always be present. There are also examples of exhibitions put in the service of politics, such as the large-scale, image-building exhibitions of Italian art in London and Paris during the years of fascism. The majority of present-day exhibitions do not facilitate research. The usual recipe is rather the following: take a few paintings that entice visitors, display works at hand around them which match the age and topic, and you have got an exhibition. It is often forgotten that people are far more mobile than before and travel restrictions have disappeared in a large part of the world. Thus artworks do not necessarily have to be taken to a certain place for people to see them. The professor would be very much in favour of a joint ethical code, which would support the movement of masterpieces only in professionally well-grounded cases.

An exhibition held in the New York Metropolitan Museum in 1988 played an important role in the ‘fashion’ for Sienese painting, which is another example of a show advancing matters. Why did this chapter of art history become fashionable? There can be several explanations, but the professor thinks it was primarily because of its double nature. Quattrocento Sienese painting is the imprint of a transition period. The works simultaneously present a traditional and a novel approach, nostalgia for the past and the endeavour to look for something new are present at the same time.

Professor de Marchi also works for large international auction houses as an expert, thus he knows a lot about the role the period currently plays in the art trade. He has experienced – and reckons this also supports his view – that interest in the old masters has at best stagnated, but rather fallen recently. A possible reason could be that the supply of those works is narrower. Yet at the same time collectors tend to turn to modern and contemporary works, which have a higher prestige these days and are more easily ‘digestible’ for most collectors. Where can you find the former large private collections of medieval art today! True, in Russia and China such collections are compiled, but what is lacking is the professional background, which was still present in the case of earlier collections. In this respect criticism must be expressed in terms of education, which usually does not pay enough attention to visual culture and is concerned even less with the art of earlier centuries. Yet the increasing popularity of 14th and 15th century art in museums somewhat affects the art trade: should they turn up at auctions, the outstanding artworks of this period achieve extremely high prices. Of course, to what extent the artwork going under the hammer is researched or how precisely its provenance is documented matter a great deal.

Although this was not his first visit to Hungary, a long time has passed since his earlier trips. He came in 1986 and then in 1993, that is at the beginning of his career, but he could already meet experts such as VilmosTátrai in the Museum of Fine Arts and PálCséfalvay in the Christian Museum of Esztergom.

MiklósBoskovits, who chose to emigrate at the end of the 1960s had the greatest influence on him. Boskovits had two very different faces. As a university lecturer he was almost unapproachable and excluded everything that could have disturbed his work. Students were often scared to address him, but today De Marchi understands him – if you really want to focus on your work you cannot dissipate yourself. Yet in his personal life he was open and humorous.

On this visit Professor De Marchi’s most important aim was to introduce Corpus of Sienese Paintings 1420–1510 by DóraSallay, who works in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts. The work is published by the prestigious Florentine art publisher Centro Di. It discusses, as part of a series, the Sienese paintings held in Hungary’s above-mentioned two museums. It resembles a catalogue, yet is far more than that: it provides a nearly complete overview of the period’s more and less significant masters. The wealth and variety of the material enabled the author to write her own overview, involving several new discoveries of the art and society of the Sienese quattrocento. A highly valuable element of the book is that she reveals several connections between works held in Hungary and elsewhere, and reconstructs what was dismantled and scattered over time. Her new results are partly due to the fact that she did not try to fit the artworks to theories, but started off with a thorough observation of the fragments in the museums and reconstructed the original contexts on that basis, and by putting those into broader connections she has presented the oeuvres of individual artists. Sallay managed to make a virtue of necessity: the financial means of research are obviously more limited in Budapest that say in London or Paris, so she could not employ the full arsenal of analytic methods but had to precisely define the questions for which she was seeking answers.

Besides the book launch, Professor De Marchi held a lecture focusing on the oeuvres of the Duccio and Giotto. He also spent two full days scrutinizing again the early Italian collections of the museums in Esztergom and Budapest, which he had explored on his earlier visits. The collections in Hungary represent a broad spectrum of works and the concept which focuses exclusively on outstanding masterpieces is arguably mistaken, he believes. You have to dig deep to learn and evaluate a period – each artwork is a window onto the past.