Antal András Deák, senior museologist at the Danube Museum
MúzeumCafé 8.
Marking the Year of the Renaissance, he gave a talk in Esztergom about the history of the Renaissance hydraulic machine. On that occasion the title ‘historian of technology’ was next to his name. His office, more precisely his desk, is in the loft of the Danube Museum. If people ask what he does he usually says he is a museologist. Antal András Deák is actually a qualified teacher of Hungarian and German and he worked in education for ten years. In 1983 he started to work for the Danube Museum in Esztergom. His career there took a serious turn when the museum purchased Count Luigi Fernando Marsigli’s six-volume scientific masterpiece, Danubius Pannonico Mysicus. Marsigli (1658-1730) was a military engineer with the rank of general. He and his cartographer Johann Christoph Müller made the first authentic maps of the Hungarian section of the Danube and the hydrography of the Carpathian basin, as well as defining the geographical positions of several settlements. A few years ago Antal András Deák received a two-week scholarship at the University of Bologna, Italy. He found documents connected to the general and his cartographer, which made the startled dean of the university exclaim: “And have we had these here all along?” The Discovery of the Danube reveals the genesis of Marsigli’s work, and Maps from under the Shadow of the Crescent Moon introduces 270 manuscript maps produced jointly by Marsigli and Müller. They were lying undiscovered in the archives of Bologna University and the Museum of Military History in Vienna. Antal András Deák has been instrumental in their identification and classification.