1. Hungarian Late Gothic Painting and Sculpture (15-16th c.)

The work, one of the most beautiful examples of Hungarian winged altarpieces, was probably made for a side altar in the Benedictine Abbey of Garamszentbenedek (present-day Hronský Beňadik, Slovakia). The Latin inscription in the predella, destroyed in a 19th-century fire but surviving in a copy, contains the date of the work and names the commissioner shown above praying under the cross – Nicholas, son of Peter (or Petös), a canon of Győr and royal chaplain of Buda –, as well as the painter Thomas de Coloswar. The named painter was an outstanding late exponent of the International Gothic style. He created his own, individual formal language, which reveals his ties with contemporary Bohemian panel and miniature painting. He was attracted by such problems as perspective or the portrait-like rendering of faces. He must have belonged to the artistic circle of the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary (1387-1437) and Holy Roman Emperor, who appears in this work in the guise of the elegant Roman soldier to the right of the cross. The inner sides of the movable wings depict four scenes from the Passion of Christ: Agony in the Garden, Carrying of the Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension. In its closed state, the altarpiece originally showed four scenes from the lives of the saints, which the commissioner set as examples before the medieval viewers of the altarpiece. The miraculous elements in the lives of Saint Benedict, Saint Giles and Saint Nicholas refer to the mystery of the Eucharist, and by extension, also to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The fourth exterior scene is unfortunately lost. The altarpiece was brought to Archbishop János Simor’s gallery around 1872, before the Neo-Gothic remodeling of the Abbey church, in a dismantled state and without its original frames.