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| Photo by Eszter Gordon |
The Museum of Fine Arts will open an exhibition entitled The Splendour of the Medici: Art and Life in Renaissance Florence on January 24, kicking off a series of exhibitions and events planned to celebrate Hungary's Renaissance Year, the 550th anniversary of King Matthias Corvinus's ascension to the throne. It will include some 200 works by artists such as Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci and Donatello.
The Budapest History Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts, the Hungarian National Gallery and the National Széchényi Library will team up to present a joint exhibition on the Renaissance. The Budapest History Museum will show the court of King Matthias, the Museum of Applied Arts will present Italian ceramics from the period, the National Gallery will show Hungarian renaissance art, and the Széchényi Library will show the early culture of books. The exhibitions will open in March. In the autumn, the Museum of Ethnography will open an exhibition re-examining the Renaissance in folk art.
The Műcsarnok on Heroes' Square will show an exhibition of contemporary Hungarian artists as part of the Renaissance Year celebration.
On April 18, the Hungarian Agriculture Museum will open an exhibition entitled Renaissance Wine, Renaissance Life, Tokaj Renaissance.
But the Renaissance will not be the only era in focus next year. The Hungarian National Museum will offer visitors an exhibition on the history and culture of the people of the Scythians, a nation of horse-riding nomads that dominated Central Asia in Classical Antiquity. It will feature more than a thousand objects, including gold jewellery, carpets and an excellently preserved mummy. The museum will also show treasures from the grave of the prince Kurgan Arshan, uncovered by German and Russian archaeologists in Siberia in 2000. The exhibition, organised by Germany's Pre- and Early History Museum and the German Institute of Archaeologists, has already travelled to Berlin, Munich and Hamburg.
From the Palace of the Sun King to the Court of Napoleon, a collection of two centuries of French drawings, will open at the Museum of Fine Arts in February. In June, the museum will also open an exhibition of images by Hungary's greatest photographers, including André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassai and Robert Capa. The museum will follow up with a retrospective of the works of the symbolist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) in September. The exhibition shows works on loan from some of Switzerland's most important museums as well as private collections. At the end of September, the Museum of Fine Arts will open an exhibition entitled Klimt and the Start of the Vienna Jugendstil, showing objects from Vienna's Albertina Museum.
The Hungarian Natural History Museum will open an exhibition entitled Ice Age at the beginning of April. Among the objects on display will be a mummified baby mammoth on loan from the Saint Petersburg Zoological Institute as well as the bones of an adult mammoth.
From the start of 2008, Hungary's state-owned museums will no longer offer visitors free admission to their permanent exhibitions. However, the price of tickets will be kept low - around the price of a cinema ticket.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
