Két atipikus Markó-festmény a kismartoni Esterházy-kastély parkjáról

Abstract

The paper is connected to the Budapest exhibition in 2011 of Károly Markó (1793–1860), who was born in Hungary but earned a fame as a landscapist in Italy. In the exhibition catalogue Sabine Grabner wrote an article with the title Károly Markó's Viennese Connections, and published two, so-far unknown Markó paintings of 1831 from the central Bohemian country house of Červena Lhota: Landscape with figures in a boat and Landscape with figures strolling in the park. The present paper highlights the identification of the themes of the two paintings. Both were painted of the landscape garden of the Esterházy mansion in Kismarton/Eisenstadt, exactly its two most characteristic views: one shows the lateral view of the garden facade of the mansion and its surroundings, the other features the Leopoldine temple with the pond in front of it. The landscape garden and its edifices were commissioned by Prince Nicolaus Esterházy II (1765–1833), a fabulously rich Hungarian aristocrat and art collector from the Paris-based architect Charles Moreau who studied in Rome. The Leopoldine temple was modelled on the Sybilla temple in Tivoli (the marble statue of Esterházy's daughter Leopoldine was made by Canova for the temple). Contemporaries and posterity reckon with Markó as the painter of “ideal landscapes with Biblical or mythological figures” and later “Italian landscapes with peasants”. The two paintings of the Kismarton landscape garden are atypical because they present real garden segments, contemporary architecture and genre figures dressed in the fashionable garments of the painter's time. They are unparalleled in the whole Markó oeuvre. The paper compares the depicted garden sections and buildings with the venues today on the one hand, and with depictions approximately contemporaneous with Markó's works. The latter comparison provides ground to determine how much of the real sight is reflected in the pictures and how much is the pictorial trope drawn from a long-standing tradition by a painter of ideal landscapes. The paper also touches on the question of the client. It is found that the two pictures were not created for Prince Nicolaus Esterházy who had the mansion and the garden around it built in Eisenstadt, but for a Vienna banker, Markó's main sponsor baron Johann Jakob Geymüller (1760–1834) and his wife. It was from the Geymüller family's Bohemian country house at Kamenica nad Lipou/ Kamnitz that the two painting came to Červena Lhota, and they probably belonged to the multitude of Markó paintings the couple ordered directly from the painter. (In the Austrian mansion of the family at Hollenburg there were still 14 Markó paintings in the early 20th century.) This is also a good example of the shift of art patronage in the early 19th century from the old artistocracy to new art-supporting layers.