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Where is the Portrait of Bismarck, formerly in the Museum of Fine Arts?

The painting the Third Reich diplomat set his eye on

MúzeumCafé 13.

author: Radványi Orsolya művészettörténész

In April 1893 representatives of the Museum of Fine Arts turned up at a Lenbach exhibition in the old Kunsthalle. The purchase was an everyday practice for museologists and the portrait they bought was not sensational. Highlighting the sound political relationship between the German Empire and Hungary must have played a role in selecting it. […]

Municipal Picture Gallery – past and present – Fine Arts in the Budapest History Museum’s Kiscell Museum

MúzeumCafé 13.

author: Beatrix Basics, deputy director of the Budapest History Museum

The National Exhibition of 1885 resulted in the establishment of the Municipal Museum. The decision to set it up was taken in 1887 but its actual opening took place only following the 1896 Millennium exhibition. For Bálint Kuzsinszky, the first director, fine arts represented tools for documentation. That concept characterised the first exhibition during the […]

History cast in plaster

MúzeumCafé 13.

author: Géza Andó, head of it, Museum of Fine Arts, and Edit Szentesi, art historian, Art History Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Budapest’s first historical collection of sculptural copies was established by Ferenc Pulszky (1814–1897) in the Hungarian National Museum between 1870 and 1875. The majority of the collection included plaster casts of statues and reliefs from Athens, which a formatore from Rome who settled in Athens, Felice Napoleone Martinelli (†1891), had made. He originally worked for […]

Leonardo da Vinci Puzzle

Research of Budapest Horse and Related Bronzes at National Gallery of Art, Washington

MúzeumCafé 13.

author: Shelley Sturman, Alison Luchs, Katherine May

The Rearing Horse and Mounted Warrior, a bronze statuette from the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, is the focus of recent technical examinations by National Gallery of Art conservators and is also the centerpiece of a small exhibition, The Budapest Horse: A Leonardo da Vinci Puzzle. The initial results, involving comparison with similar studies of […]