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The exhibition, which showcases the life's work of Giacomo Marastoni, has opened after six years of preparation. It displays 240 pieces from 28 public and church collections in four countries, as well as 240 pieces on loan from private collectors.
Giacomo Marastoni, or as he used it in Hungarian: Jakab Marastoni (1804‒1860) was born in Venice and studied at the famous Academy of Fine Arts there. In the early 1830s, he went on a tour of Austria, then moved to Bratislava in 1833. In 1836, he moved his location to Pest, where he lived until his death.
Marastoni joined the renewal of Hungary during the Reform era, worked as a portrait painter during the Bratislava and Cluj-Napoca parliaments, and worked for decades on commissions from noble and bourgeois families. In 1846, he opened his pioneering institution, the First Hungarian Academy of Painting, on the third floor of a building designed by József Hild in Nagyhíd Street in Pest – sacrificing all his wealth. He acquired the necessary art replicas, plaster sculptures, and engravings from Italy. The opening was a defining cultural event in Pest, generating great interest, and the artist was elected an honorary citizen of Pest that same year. The private art training institution, which was also supported by a patronage organization, existed until 1860, until Marastoni’s death. Important artists of the second half of the 19th century – including Mihály Szemlér and Károly Lotz – also studied at his school.
The exhibition presents the family and studies of Jakab Marastoni, and traces his life from Venice through Vienna and Bratislava to Pest. As an artist and art organizer, Marastoni quickly became a defining figure in Pest public life; his network of contacts, his Academy in Pest, and the early activities of Hungarian artists who started there and later gained great fame were decisive in the development of both Bratislava and Pest during the Reformation. His art school operated along traditional academic values, with the intention of creating a higher education in fine arts in Hungary. At that time – as it often is today – an artist often tried his luck in different parts of Europe, and Marastoni’s identity linked to several nations was natural when included in the Central Europeanness of the Habsburg Empire. At the end of the Reform Era, he was considered the most significant portrait painter in the country, alongside Miklós Barabás, and later became an early experimenter with the daguerreotype. His private institution was the most significant predecessor of the state art education established in 1871.
This is the first exhibition that attempts to review the oeuvre of Jakab Marastoni. In addition to starting from the Fine Arts Collection of the Budapest History Museum and the materials of the Metropolitan Art Gallery, it presents works on loan from the most significant Hungarian public collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery and the Hungarian National Museum. In addition, several works of art are being shown in Budapest for the first time, such as the large family portrait of the Scherz family on loan from the Bratislava City Gallery, but the special drawings from the collection of the BTM Kiscelli Museum – Metropolitan Art Gallery, nearly 60 study drawings, have never been seen before.
The exhibition of his life's work, which opens as a result of six years of preparatory work, will display 240 works of art from 28 public and church collections in four countries, as well as 240 works of art on loan from private collectors.
The exhibition will be open to the public from June 19 to October 26, 2025, daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Photos: Castle Museum
