There is an
exhibition of Serbian religious art in Hungary currently at the Balassi Institute,
Brussels. The opening was held on 13 February; this is an edited text of my
remarks. A video version of what I said can be found here or here.
We have been together a long time, Serbs and
Hungarians. I did a little research this afternoon to look into the history and
there was interaction between the Serbian and Hungarian monarchies from early
on, despite the adherence of the one to Byzantium and the other to Rome. As
every Hungarian schoolchild knows, or did when I was young, the relief by János
Hunyadi of the siege of Nándorfehérvár (Beograd to the Serbs, but it’s the same
“white castle”) in 1456 was a key event that halted the northward expansion of
the Ottomans for several generations.
The same fate, conquest by the Ottomans overtook us
both, though we were fortunate that Hungary was just that bit further to the
north and thus at the outer limit of the Ottoman empire’s military capabilities
and we were freed from the Ottomans a century and a half sooner. That allowed
the kings of Hungary, by then the Hapsburgs, to allow Arsenije III to bring the
37,000 Serbian families to the Vojvodina as refugees. They then became the
guardians of the marches, the graničari; their descendants live in Vojvodina to
this day.
Some of the Serbs settled in Szentendre, (and in some
other towns on the Danube, like Ráckeve) and were active in the water-borne
trade on the Danube. The wealth of some of these merchants, the export-import
multinationals of the time, was to pay for the religious art that we can see
here tonight.
Of course there were unhappy interactions as well, in
1848-1849, and the Second World War brought about the lowest point, with
vicious massacres on both sides. The truth about these terrible events is
slowly being brought to light by Serbian and Hungarian historians working
together.
But the meeting point between Western and Eastern
Christianity produced its own complex interactions and mutual influences, which
have left their mark on both parties. In sum, Western Christianity has always
accepted a multiplicity of forms and complexity as a central features of life.
The doctrine of Purgatory meant the acceptance of intermediacy between good and
evil, between Heaven and Hell, together with the possibility of redemption. The
Reformation meant an end to Catholic Universalism and gave rise to a
competitive religious environment. Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand,
insisted on the unity of the physical and the metaphysical, the transience of
life on this earth, and the role of the collective together with the individual
conscience.
The art produced by Western Christianity sought to
portray beauty as the gift of God (in the south) and the fragility, emotion,
and realism of religious belief (north of the Alps). Protestantism mostly
abjured pictorial representation in the religious realm, although it built on
the realism and was brought to its peak by Rembrandt. Orthodox art reflected
something else. It emphasised the unchanging quality of the sacred, a stillness
and relied on two-dimensionality to portray this.
What we can see here tonight is a subtle blend of the
Orthodox style touched by elements of the Baroque, in a manner one never finds
in Russia in St. Petersburg or Moscow or Pskov. The pictures in this exhibition
indicate that these mostly unknown icon painters accepted three-dimensionality
and a sense of colour that brings them to within hailing distance of the Western
tradition of art, while remaining clearly Orthodox in inspiration. The only
parallel I know in art history (and I’m no expert) is the Venetian tradition
that lived on until the 17th century, the paintings representing groups of
saints in the sacra conversazione depicted
by Giovanni Bellini for one, but traces can be found in Titian too.
So my congratulations to the organisers, what they
have put on is genuinely a product of the best of Serbian-Hungarian relations.
Sch. Gy.
