Budapest's Metro is the second-oldest electrically-operated underground railway in the world (the London Underground is the oldest). Three of its four lines opened in the years since 1970, but its original line started operations in 1896. This line, now known as Line 1, includes one station very near to St. István's Basilica, and another very close to Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts. While the line's cars have been updated since 1896, they couldn't be considered state-of-the-art, but they were more than adequate to the task of efficiently conveying us between these two stations.

The Metro station near the Fine Art Museum is called Hosök tere, a name having nothing to do with museums or art. It translates as "Heroes' Square", referring to a large open area next to the museum filled with monuments and statues.

Construction of the structures and figures in Heroes' Square was begun in 1896 to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Magyar conquest of the region. The principal structures within the square are a central column, a large rectangular cenotaph in front of it, and two curved colonnades behind it. The cenotaph is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but nobody is buried there – it's a memorial to Hungarian heroes in general. At the top of the column is the Archangel Gabriel, holding the Hungarian crown and an apostolic double-cross. Bunched around the base of the column are figures of the seven Magyar chieftains most instrumental in the conquest of the area. For the record, these chieftains were Elod, Ond, Kond, Árpád, Tas, Huba and Töhötöm, with Árpád (in the middle) considered to have been the most important.



Not much is known about the seven chieftains, so most of the details in their statues come from the imagination of the sculptor. Chieftain Huba's depiction looks particularly interesting, with antlers having been attached to his horse's face. This was no doubt intended to be fearsome, and in an actual battle maybe it would have been, but I can’t help but be reminded of the hapless dog/reindeer in the classic cartoon of the Grinch and Christmas.

The matching colonnades behind the column each depict seven figures from Hungarian history, above reliefs that show them doing whatever made them great. The colonnade on the left originally had statues of figures from the Habsburg dynasty, as it was built when Hungary was part of Austria-Hungary. However, after the colonnade was damaged during World War II, these figures were replaced with figures of Hungarian kings. On top of the colonnades there are allegorical figures of chariot-driving figures representing war and peace.


On the right (southeast) side of Heroes' Square is the Kunsthalle Budapest, a neoclassical building which houses temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, and which has no permanent collection of its own. This isn't what we'd come here for. Instead, we were interested in the building across from it, on the left (northwest) side of the square, the Museum of Fine Arts.

The Museum of Fine Arts first opened in 1906, and was created to establish a place for the merging of multiple collections which were distributed throughout the city. The museum houses an impressive collection of antiquities, as well as a collection of paintings and sculpture ranging from the Middle Ages through the 19th Century. Or rather it would house these collections if it were not undergoing an extensive renovation. At the time of our visit in 2014, we were able to see the collections, but the museum closed for the renovation in February of 2015, and is not expected to reopen until autumn of 2018. In the meantime, some of its works are on display at the Hungarian National Gallery in Buda Castle. Below is some of what we saw. First, a few antiquities:


Here are a couple of pre-Renaissance works:

Early in the Renaissance, painted subjects were becoming less two-dimensional:

Here are some more Renaissance works. Around this time, artwork subject matter was starting to deviate from the strictly religious. The bronze of the Horse with Mounted Warrior was judged in 1916 to be a work by Leonardo da Vinci, and it is believed to depict King Francis I of France (though consensus is weaker on this). Due to its lack of finish, it's believed to be a model for a (probably larger) planned work which was never completed.


There are a number of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a German Renaissance painter who was an early advocate of the Christian Reformation movement, and who was in fact a close friend of Martin Luther. The paintings of ill-matched couples show two sides of the same coin, with the more attractive members of each couple being mainly interested in the wealth of the less attractive ones. Fortunately, people have outgrown this sort of behavior in the centuries since the Renaissance.


Artistic technique continued to evolve through the rest of the 16th Century, both in northern Europe and in the south (mainly Italy). Roman mythology was becoming a popular subject for artworks.




Also represented at the museum is the Brueghel clan of the Habsburg Netherlands. The first Brueghel to make a name for himself was Pieter the Elder, who is known for "Where's Waldo?"-like paintings crowded with many small figures. The other two Brueghels of note were his sons Pieter the Younger and Jan the Elder. Pieter the Younger's style was much like his father's, while Jan was more interested in developing his own.


The 17th Century was also a time when Spanish artists were making their mark, and several of their works are also on display in the museum.


Some rooms in the museum had both paintings and sculpture.


Flemish/Dutch painting in the 17th Century was largely done for ordinary citizens, and the subjects were usually portraits or scenes from everyday life.



Here are some 18th Century works. Donner and Messerschmidt were German-Austrian sculptors, and Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) was a Venetian painter, most famous for his paintings of his hometown.


Works from the first half of the 19th Century include the following by the Spaniard Goya and the Dane Thorvaldsen.


Though Thorvaldsen and Canova would have their supporters, the most celebrated sculptor of the 19th Century would probably be Auguste Rodin.

And no 19th Century collection could be considered complete without some examples of French Impressionism.


Finally, the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin was a painter of scenes with mythological figures, influenced by Romanticism. Despite the gravity of most of his paintings (he painted five different canvases called "Isle of the Dead"), he seems to have harbored a somewhat goofy sense of humor. His "Centaur at the Village Blacksmith":

After combing through the Museum of Fine Arts, we were ready for a break, being still pretty jet-lagged, so we headed back to the hotel for some rest. But we were not retiring for the day – we had an appointment for dinner, at which we would be sampling both the food and the culture of Hungary.