From Caravaggio to Canaletto – and Art Collecting in Hungary
From Caravaggio to Canaletto – and Art Collecting in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: The tone of the exhibition is striking from the off. Upon entering the first hall, visitors in thrall to the conventional cliché that Baroque is “the art of the Counter-Reformation spread by Jesuit fathers”, will notice the large number of paintings that deal with everyday secular subjects. On the right handside wall, they see a still life by a follower of Caravaggio with a huge table richly laden with fruits, then on the central wall, the pain-distorted face of Caravaggio’s Boy bitten by a lizard. On the opposite wall there is a genre painting, a counterpart, as it were, of the “portrait with still life”: the interior of a tavern full of characters of dubious professions. Thus visitors are welcomed first by an allegory, then by a giant fruit-piece alluding to the richness and joy of life: the narcissistic self is accompanied by the withering, yellowing fruit-leaves of still “living” nature, as if to remind one of the transitory nature of existence. The two monumental still lifes speak of the joys of life, but already in the genre of natura morta, because everything is laid on a table, cut from its natural environment. Further away, the genre scene depicts the crooked, immoral characters and the deceitful life of gangland streets, then on the following picture depicting card-players, we find that cheap entertainment and worldly pleasures are but a cover for the actual background of Baroque’s attitude towards life: the uncertainty lurking behind temptations of everyday reality and a foreboding of changing values.

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