Budapest III -- Culture

We haven't done any actual counting or comparing, but it did seem to us that Budapest has more museums per square mile than most cities -- and, for that matter, that there are more square feet of museums. Several of them are really enormous and would truly take more than a day to appreciate.

The Hungarian National Gallery is housed in the former Royal Palace which overlooks downtown Pest from the Palace Hill on the Buda side of the Danube. (http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2297714/1/120085106) The Palace site first contained a castle as far back as 1255, with several replacements built through the years. The current one, dating from the Hapzburg dynasty in the 19th century, is the largest Palace in Europe. Royal residents have been replaced by art treasures in the Gallery, which occupies most of the Palace building. As our guide book says, in one place, "it houses every significant work of Hungarian art from Medieval times to the present". (Makes one wonder if the buyers for the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had maps that didn't show where Hungary was.)

On another page the guide book said, perhaps more accurately, that the museum houses the cream of Hungarian art. Whichever statement is true, the museum is huge and uses its large area to display a dizzying number of beautiful works in spacious displays -- paintings, sculpture, altar pieces from churches and other art objects make it a special place. Hungary (the first syllable memorializes the Huns -- Atilla's pals) has had a history filled with wars and conflict and this is graphically brought home in the Gallery where there are numerous very large paintings of battle and war scenes, of kings and noblemen dying in the arms of their retainers while the battle rages in the background. One would have to know a great deal of Hungarian history to truly appreciate the meaning of these works to Hungarians.

Also contained within the Palace is the Budapest History Museum, with a large collection of historical documents as well as artifacts. We spent too much time in the Gallery to permit visiting this museum -- it will have to be saved for our next visit. The Ethnographic museum, located next to the beautiful Parliament building was something of a disappointment, though it did have a fascinating temporary exhibit on plastics -- their history, manufacture and use. Our disappointment was probably due more to the fact that it was the only place where we encountered unhelpful staff and that we were very hungry and the museum cafe was closed for unexplained reasons.

The Museum of Fine Art and the Palace of Art are located near each other, on opposite sides of Heroes' Square. The former is in another gigantic museum building; the latter in a more modestly sized building, with the building itself being a work of art. Unfortunately, we have no pictures to share with you of these two museums as the former doesn't permit cameras and the latter was having a special exhibit of modern Scandinavian art, consisting of films of people cooking dinner, blind people feeling naked models and weird displays of articles of underwear. We didn't "get it" and didn't bother to waste the film -- or the digits, given that our camera is digital.