Art and Architecture in the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary

Abstract

The Kingdom of Hungary was established in 1000 with the coronation of Stephen as the first king of the realm. In 1102, King Coloman of the House of Árpád assumed the throne, bringing Croatia under the rule of Hungarian kings in a personal union. The Árpádian dynasty continued to rule Hungary until 1301, after which the Neapolitan Angevins rose to power. Following the reign of King Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437), the first Habsburg ruler of Hungary, Albert, ascended the throne. The second half of the 15th century saw the golden age of King Matthias Corvinus, which was followed by a period of Jagiellonian rule. The end of the medieval kingdom was marked by the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, when the advancing Ottoman army defeated the Hungarians, killing young King Louis II as well. The Ottoman conquest resulted in the disintegration of the kingdom into three parts (Royal Hungary, the Ottoman territory, and the Principality of Transylvania). It was only reunited at the end of the 17th century under Habsburg rule. This history explains why the study of art in medieval Hungary is complicated. First of all, major sites in the center of the kingdom, in towns such as Esztergom, Buda, Visegrád, and Szekesfehervar, were destroyed. In the more peripheral areas of the kingdom, especially in Transylvania and the former Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia), the artistic heritage of the Middle Ages has survived to a greater degree—however, Hungary lost these areas in the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty. The territory of the medieval kingdom is now located in eight countries in addition to Hungary: Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. The study of medieval art in this region has often been carried out within the framework of individual modern states. This presents a historiographical and linguistic challenge and makes it quite difficult to survey the entire scholarship on the topic. For an accurate picture of medieval art in the Kingdom of Hungary, the overall geographical framework of research needs to cover the entire historic territory of the medieval kingdom. The present article looks at medieval art from the entire territory of the historic Kingdom of Hungary. The present overview concentrates on recent art historical scholarship, with a strong focus on publications in more accessible Western languages. Thanks to a renewed interest in medieval Hungary in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—which can be measured by the number of exhibitions, international conferences, monographs, and study collections published by Western publishing houses—a large body of scholarship is now available on most topics in the field of medieval art in Hungary. The early Renaissance art that played a major role at the court of King Matthias and his direct successors is not treated in the article, as that topic is the subject of a separate article.