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More than thirty years have passed since the summary catalogue of the Italian Old Master paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest was published in 1991. The volume also comprised the collection’s French and Spanish holdings, as well as the few Greek Orthodox icons held in the museum at the time. The editorial principle was to give as complete and as concise a presentation as possible of these sections of the collection. That volume, as a kind of supplement to Andor Pigler’s still irreplaceable catalogue from 1967, provided an essential database of our paintings. Soon after the volume was published, it became increasingly timely to compile an updated summary catalogue, dealing exclusively with the Italian holdings. Over thirty years later, this timeliness became a pressing obligation. The expanded and revised second edition of the catalogue contains the acquisitions that have entered the collection in the meantime, a substantially expanded bibliography, and colour photos, instead of the earlier black-and-white illustrations. Content updates extend to new attributions, questions pertaining to iconography, dating and provenance, and other results of art historical research, for instance, the indication of the preparatory drawings, companion pieces, and prints associated with the paintings. The lists of replicas, variants and copies of certain works are also longer than those in the first edition.
Since the manuscript for the first edition was concluded in 1988, the Collection of Old Master Paintings has grown with a further sixty-eight Italian paintings, and this catalogue is the first opportunity to publish them all together. Among the new acquisitions, without listing them in their entirety, we find works by Francesco Foschi, Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Aurelio Lomi, Pietro Damini, Giovanni Marracci, Francesco Ranucci, Felice Ficherelli, Simone Pignoni, Cesare Dandini, Simone Brentana, Antonio Carneo, Giambattista Piazzetta, Antonio Balestra, Benedetto Fioravanti, Vincenzo Camuccini, Luca Giordano, Paolo Domenico Finoglio, Francesco Guarino, and Flaminio Torri.
The Italian collection has also expanded in other ways. Some works inventoried in the past but later believed lost have rejoined the collection. Giorgio Vasari’s Marriage Feast at Cana, which disappeared during World War II, was returned to us from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1999, and is now reinstated in the present catalogue. A couple of other paintings that were formerly associated with a different school (either French, Spanish or Austrian) have now been included in the Italian catalogue. The publication also features a few artworks held by the museum on long-term deposit.
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