Professional confessions of a hedonistic art connoisseur
Vilmos Tátrai, chief advisor, Museum of Fine Arts
MúzeumCafé 33.
Vilmos Tátrai’s whole life as a museum specialist is connected with the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, where for 42 years he has joyfully spent all his time. He is passionately attached to works of art, and discovering their secrets and identifying their masters bring true delight for him. He has also participated in staging exhibitions which have been important from both an academic perspective and attractive for the public, and the large-scale Baroque exhibition of this year’s Italian-Hungarian season will be no exception. Due to his professional connections he has become a close friend of several foreign colleagues, and his role in spreading Italian culture has been recognized by important state awards on a number of occasions. His bibliography includes more than a hundred publications, but he would happily work on a revised edition of the Italian paintings catalogue to his heart’s content. What could be better than a profession serving as an endless source of joy? Here Vilmos Tátrai, Chief Counsellor of the Old Masters’ Collection, talks about the daily agonies and successes involved with delight in art. Tátrai’s father was an internationally noted musician and although he had great influence on him in childhood he nevertheless chose to be an art historian. His theses about Mantegna’s mythological works was published in Acta Historiae Artium. After graduating he would have very much liked to stay at the university, but at the time it was not possible. Tátrai applied for a position in the Museum of Fine Arts and director Klára Garas gave him a job in September 1970. Thus the museum became his first and since then only employer. At university he was deeply involved with studying the Italian Renaissance and then for a number of years he seemed to focus on theory. His first articles and Ph.D thesis were written on iconographic themes. He aim was to describe what you see objectively and precisely, and in the beginning he thought it could be done with the help of iconography. Naturally, there are various schools and approaches in iconography, which are sometimes contradictory. Working in a museum and the direct proximity of artworks was rather turning him towards the paintings themselves. He became a hedonistic art connoisseur and has remained such ever since. His literary output is huge and includes academic and educational articles, as well as books. He believes that precise artwork description, expressing the image in words, is by no means easy. For him to write well and expressively means being precise and accurate. The Italians have practised the art of description since Giorgio Vasari, their language is extremely rich and much can be learnt from that. Tátrai refers to Roberto Longhi, one of the most prominent researchers of style criticism in the 20th century, who reformed the language of art history in Italian in order to arrive at descriptions which were as accurate as possible. The same applies to Sydney Joseph Freedberg, who was able to characterise several hundred masters in a well-defined manner with the help of language in his writings about 16th-century Italian painting. That was what Tátrai aimed to achieve with his study Dialogue of Paintings. To grasp and describe the stylistic features of an artist is no smaller achievement than to identify an iconographic motif. He has managed to attribute the works of two great masters in recent years. His first impression, based naturally on much experience, of a painting depicting the Madonna with child and a male saint was later verified: a forgotten painting by Titian had turned up in Hungary, which is quite incredible. Although the first impression is terribly important, it can be misleading, therefore it was significant that besides the technical analysis he found descriptions of the paintings in two inventories in Modena, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus there were three reasons for attribution: stylistic criticism, technical analysis and written sources. The other case involved a composition of the Madonna with child and three angels. It could have been created in Pontormo’s workshop in the first quarter of the 16th century, as Tátrai asserted in the Festschrift issued in honour of Ildikó Ember last year. Vilmos Tátrai has worked in the Fine Arts Museum since 1970 and has been faithful to the establishment throughout his life. He is an internationally recognized researcher of the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque art, and has staged several exhibitions in connection with these themes both in Hungary and abroad. Due to his promotion of Italian-Hungarian cultural relations and spreading Italian culture at an outstanding level, Tátrai was awarded the Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity and the Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic. Among his more than 100 publications there are specialist studies as well as articles written for the general public, since he regards teaching as a task equal to research. Attribution research is his most important and passionately pursued field – he has authenticated between 40 and 50 Italian paintings held by the Fine Arts Museum, the Christian Museum in Esztergom, the Abbey of Pannonhalma and private collections.