Page - 384 - in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg - Netzwerker der Kunstwelt

384 Matthew Rampley of magyarization did not, at least until the 1880s, translate into a nationalistic cultural policy or museum practice. This was so even in the case of the Hungarian National Mu- seum, where there were important voices against a narrowly nationalistic conception of its purpose. Collecting policies are a powerful index of such attitudes. In 1818 Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846), a prominent aristocratic scholar and patron of the arts in the early nineteenth century, had argued that the newly founded Hun- garian National Museum should focus on antiquities glorifying the achievements and history of Hungary.61 Thirty years later the Hungarian Academy of Sciences made a similar argument in its “Call in the Matter of Hungarian Monuments to All Hungar- ians Concerned about National Honour”.62 The character of these appeals should not, however, be misinterpreted. Jankovich defined Hungarian nationality in territorial not ethnic terms, and he collected objects from across the German-speaking world. As a representative of the enlightened circles of reform-era Hungary, his conception of Hun- garian identity was comparable to that of Liberals such as Henszlmann, Pulszky and, ul- timately, Eitelberger. With regard to the National Museum, the conception of a national collection was not seen as in conflict with Enlightenment ideas of universal culture, for the National Museum was “national” in terms of being for the imagined community of the present Hungarian nation.63 The same held for the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. Although, in the 1890s, it came to be seen primarily as dedicated to the pro- motion of Hungarian design and applied art, with “Hungarian” defined in increasingly ethnic terms, its collecting in the 1870s and 1880s was eclectic, with a mixture of local, European and non-European artefacts that paralleled practice in museums elsewhere, including the Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna.64 On this point it is instructive to draw comparisons with Ferenc Pulszky. For all the dismissive character of his comments about the Slovaks in the early 1840s, in 1838 he published an article, On the Use of Art Collections, that echoed Jankovich’s emphasis on national collecting, yet at the same time criticised as narrow-minded the idea that these 61 M. Jankovich, Esedezés a magyar régiségek iránt [Pleading for Hungarian Antiquities], Tu- dományos Gyűjtemény, 2, 1818, H.  12, pp.  121–123. Republished in A Magyar műveszet- történet-irás programjai. Válogatás két évaszázad irásaiból [Programmes of Hungarian art history : Selected writings from two centuries] (ed. E. Marosi), Budapest 1999, pp.  15–17. 62 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Felszólitás minden, a nemzeti becsületet szivén viselő nagyarhoz a hazai műemlékek ügyében, Magyar Academiai Értesitő, 7.2, February 1847, pp.  v–xi. 63 Ébli, Universal Culture and National Identity (cit. n.  44), p.  381. 64 On the history of the museum’s collections in this period see P. Ács/Z. Vámos-Lovay/H. Hor- váth, Az idő sodrában : Az ipárművészeti múzeum gyűjteményeinek története [In the draft of time : the history of the collections of the Museum of Applied Arts], Budapest 2006. Open Access © 2019 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN