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Introduction

We heartily present this collection of fine art pictures and kindly invite you to visit it. The objective of the presentation is not to show original works of art or newly scanned images of well-known art objects, it is to demonstrate the new prospect opened up to us in the field of art education by the developing Internet technologies. Our set purpose is to create a virtual gallery in which the treasures of Hungarian art, rich but insufficiently known part of the European cultural heritage, will be exhibited. We intend this presentation to be a working model of this future gallery and hope to gain sufficient sponsorship to create it. We are convinced that a collection like this, having a balanced mixture of interlinked visual and textual information, can serve multiple purposes. In the first place it can simply be a source of artistic enjoyment, while partly making up for a visit to a far-away museum, partly inviting to see the real thing. However, at the same time it can effectively supplement the traditional teaching tools, and furthermore, it can be developed into a valuable database with scientifically checked data of the included art objects.

In the present stage - restricted by the lack of both financial resources, storage capacity and time - the presentation is limited to exhibit some 1000 electronic reproductions of European art objects (mainly but not exclusively paintings) created between the years of 1300 and 1600, a splendid period of the European culture centred around the Renaissance. The pictures were selected from a larger and continuously growing collection of about 4500 files covering wider time period and not limited to Europe. The explanations and remarks accompanying the individual objects are heterogeneous in both length, quality and distribution, as follows from the diverse bibliographic materials at our disposal. In the next future we prefer to increase the number of expertly commented and interlinked pictures rather than increase the overall number. In addtion, we intend to elaborate the art of many other great masters in the way we did it in the case of Piero della Francesca and Giovanni Bellini. However, all our efforts will be directed towards the creation of a gallery for Hungarian painting with explanations in both Hungarian and English languages.

You can have practical information on the technical questions of visiting this site by using the link Technical Info. If you wish to get a quick glimpse of the method of presentation in the gallery, click on the Random link and you obtain a random selection of 10 pictures.

Welcome to the Gallery, enjoy your visit!

Acknowledgements

The pictures exhibited were partly scanned by us, partly collected from public sites on the Internet. We are greatly indebted to the organizers of all art Web sites from where we borrowed picture files, and to the creators of the files. Special thanks are due to Mark Harden and Carol Gerten-Jackson for their excellent quality scans without which this collection would be much poorer. The comments were compiled from different sources, most of the biographic data were taken from Microsoft® Encarta 1995.

Last but not least we express our sincere thanks to the Computer Networking Center of KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for providing disk capacity on their Web server and thus making this presentation possible.

This page was accessed times since 2nd October 1996.

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