Hungarian views on Persian art in 19th century
Nobody in Hungary or Austria at the past time seems to have had a realistic image of Persian art: instead, the image which was still awaiting crystallisation in international scholarship until the 1900s, suffered a premature but long-lasting distortion by the preconceptions of 19th-century Magyar nationalism.
Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913), for example, as late as 1895, championed the idea of a Persianised substratum of the early Hungarians in line with the romantic patriotism of his early 19th century compatriots, despite his extensive travels and language skills.
He claimed that the Huns, and especially their ruler, Attila, himself—far from being nomadic barbarians—had adopted Sassanid principles of kingship, a practice followed by the Timurids, Shaybanids, and other later Turkic dynasties the Iranian acculturation of which he presented as an analogy for early Hungarian state organisation.
It was this assimilative model, he claimed, that the Huns and the Hungarians did follow; both having established a Sassanid-influenced legal and social system in their newly conquered land. In support of this argument, the leading Hungarian archaeologists of the late 1800s strove to reveal the Sassanid essence of many archaeological finds which they claimed to be Hunnic or Hungarian.
Perso-Islamic art was not collected or examined by Hungarians in a systematic way during these years. Nearly all discussions about this topic were generated by the nationalist fervour which was running high by 1896, the year of the Millennial Exposition (celebrating the Magyar conquest of Hungary). This approach also prevailed in the Oriental Academy of Commerce (Keleti Kereskedelmi Akadémia), a school of economics, originating in 1891 (and formally existing between 1899 and 1919).Turkish and Arabic—as opposed to Persian—were regularly taught at the Academy apart from the major European languages, and a particularly strong emphasis was laid on South Slavic languages.
Oriental anthropology and ethnography also bore a lot of weight in the curriculum, reflecting the demands of the founder and first president Ignác Kúnos (1860–1945), himself a noted Turkic ethnographer.
Apparently, the academy did not consider the art and architecture of the subject areas worthy of study, as it regarded the craftsmanship of these areas to stagnate on an ethnographic level or inseparably bound to religion. Yet popular art was highly valued as a precondition for the creation of applied (or industrial) arts which represented the progress towards civilisation. It was believed that the study of Bosnian ethnography would yield a better understanding of the local working ethos and market conditions, both of which were eagerly exploited by economists.
(Bosnia and Herzegovina fell under Austro-Hungarian rule in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin approved the occupation of the Bosnia Vilayet, which officially remained part of the Ottoman Empire. Three decades later, in 1908, Austria-Hungary provoked the Bosnian Crisis by formally annexing the occupied zone, establishing the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the joint control of Austria and Hungary.)
Those who denied the existence of a fully-developed Bosnian national style within the general artistic horizon of the Balkans, emphasised that the task of creating such a style was part of the civilising mission of the occupational power.
Whereas traditional Bosnian art was downplayed throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the arts of Persia were firmly recognised as the highest achievements of Muslim artistic creativity. European scholarship went on to construct a hierarchy for the various “schools” of “Muhammadan” art, and Persia, especially its carpets, received the highest place, taking precedence over the arts of the Arabs and Turks. But the almost desperate attempts of western scholars at strictly defining and categorising the essentials of Persian, Arab and Turkish national arts in formal terms were ultimately failed, and this led to the establishment of the notion of Islamic art as the ultimate framework which would accommodate the artistic production of every Muslim land.