Gerszi Teréz - Tóth Bernadette et.al. : The New Ideal of Beauty in the Age of Pieter Bruegel - Sixteenth-century Netherlandish Drawings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

With the assistance of Bernadett Toth.

Teréz Gerszi has been publishing on the Bruegel era and its wider frame in time and space since 1959. As the exhibition of her drawings collection from the Budapest Museum, this catalogue can be taken as her last word on the works that she has curated for more than a half-century.

The drawings are organized chronologically, in clusters with temporal logic. The first segment, while defined as transitional, “Development of the Late Gothic Style and the Reception of Italian Art,” actually features “Romanists,” including Heemskerck and Floris. Section Two, “Pieter Bruegel and the Influence of his Landscape Art,” builds around the 1554 Large Landscape with Trees and a Church, touched by Campagnola. Despite the Bruegel presence in the catalogue title, pride of place in this book truly belongs to Italy’s influence. Remaining sections concentrate on how Italian influence radiated into Northern courts and cities. Section Four focuses on Munich, especially court artists Frederik Sustris and Pieter de Witte/Candid. In Section Six, Prague meets Haarlem, “Dutch Masters in the Duality of Late Mannerism and Realism. Finally, a pair of landscape sketchbooks date near the end of the century. Some of these drawings have been exhibited often elsewhere, while others – always of high quality and worthy of study – have rarely been seen, let alone published.