Transregional artistic cooperation in the 13th century in accordance with some Hungarian court art examples

Abstract

During the Middle Ages, the natural geographical zone of artistic connections was limited to directly neighbouring regions and territories, and these contacts were immediate and interactive in nature. Artistic contacts reaching far beyond the borders of usual trade and cultural exchange zones can be characterized with adjectives such as transregional or continental, rather than interregional. Whenever we face a phenomenon ignoring the logic of the linear spread of styles, it is worth analyzing the tendency of compensation of Europe's cultural map and the process of development of international style phenomena on one hand, and on the other hand, the development of new forms of cultural cooperation and of new social attitudes can be observed. A new line in the research of Hungarian art in the first third of the 13th century focuses on artworks showing a primary connection to faraway French gothic art centres. While analyzing the new church of Pannonhalma, built ca. 1220, and the sepulchral monuments of Pilis abbey (ca. 1230), the aim of this presentation is to find new viewpoints to the history of unusual and exceptional faraway connections, to the questions of channels and mechanisms of transregional cultural cooperation, to the special reasons and ways of long distance cultural transport. The recent inspiration of French models can be analyzed from and artistic geographical point of view as well, although its socio-historical connections are also of interest. The traceable channels of this phenomenon are mostly well-documented motivations of primarily political connections of ruling dynasties and their immediate environment.