The Park of Antal Festetics at Dég

EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES Gábor Alföldy USEFUL BEAUTY: THE PARK OF ANTAL FESTETICS AT DÉG Theses of a doctoral (PhD) dissertation DOCTORAL SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY Head of Doctoral School: Tamás Ullmann DSc, senior university professor DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN ART HISTORY Programme head: András Rényi András PhD, senior university professor OPPONENTS: Edit Szentesi PhD György Kurucz CSc, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBERS AND THEIR ACADEMIC TITLES Chairman: András Rényi PhD Secretary: Julianna Ágoston PhD Pál Lővei DSc György Kelényi DSc Péter Farbaky PhD ADVISOR: Géza Galavics MHAS Budapest, 2019 Research purposes This dissertation takes for its topic the largest landscape garden of Hungary, with the park’s designer and commissioner as protagonist. The park was predicted even when it was being built that it would surpass every other park in the country, contemporaries only ever spoke about it in superlatives for decades after it had been finished, emphasizing the modernity of the house, the garden’s richness in unusual plants, declaring its pond to be “beyond compare.” Commissioner Antal Festetics Antal, “the richest member of the Hungarian gentry” was regarded as the best manager among the country’s landowners. His person, together with his residence and its park had been long forgotten by the 20th century. József Sisa’s monograph, published in 2005, was a real breakthrough. The purpose of my own research of over 15 years was to get to know the composition, character, and real significance of this park. At the time the park was in my care and I was eager to reconstruct the circumstances of its genesis, and to find out the real reasons behind contemporaries’ superlatives through researching the site’s history of reception. Research methods Ideally, the source of a country house garden’s history is the private archive of the owner’s family. While the archives of the Keszthely branch of the Festetics family have survived intact, the archive of Dég was destroyed by World War 2. My research, therefore, was focused on surviving images, occasional mentions of the Dég family, objects and analogies, and the closest possible familiarity with the site itself. (Like all heritage sites, historical gardens are their own inexhaustible historical sources.) My archival research conducted in the National Archives, as well as the county archives of Somogy, Vas, Veszprém, the Archives of the Hungarian Reformed Church at Pápa, ELTE, and the Archdiocesal Archives of Veszprém yielded important results. However, the real thing was found concealed in the formery unknown collection in the Main Archives of Budapest. I found a rich set of documents concerning the legal issues touching on the family estate and the family trust, containing important information about the park itself, such as the registry drawn up on the death of Antal Festetics in 1853. My bibliographical collection work provided the other angle of my research, completed in the late 1990s. It was then that I had to face the fact that mentions of Hungary in international 19th- century journals on gardening and agriculture are practically unknown among Hungarian researchers, although these journals were the high-quality platforms for academic and professional communication before the advent of specialized Hungarian journals. Processing the massive German material, I found a large number of writings on the building of Dég and the history of the place’s reception which help complete my dissertation. The writings of József Bartosságh, an important professional of his age, were particularly important. Bartosságh spent a long time near Dég, and later managed the estate of Antal Festetics’s relatives, and so became an eye witness of how the estate of Dég evolved, including building the residence and the pond measuring 2 km in length. He called Dég the symbol of Hungarian development. It is due to him that we know about the contribution of Bernhard Petri, a designer of European frame. Main findings The key to the superlatives is therefore to be sought in the talents and personal ambitions of the two protagonists One of them is Antal Festetics, the founder of a model farm in the middle of Mezőföld and the creator of a modern country residence worthy of any aristocratic client. Documents unearthed during archival and other researches have shed light on his personality, personal and material circumstances, motivations. His father, Lajos Festetics lived in a modest house at Toponár and only became a man of property on the death of his father, Kristóf Festetics, the builder of the country house of Keszthely. Lajos Festetics took on enormous debts in order to buy Szigetvár and Dég - as a second son, his inheritance was modest. His activity as mentor, however, matched that of his predecessor: he commissioned the building of houses and churches, was the most significant patron of Dorffmaister (creator of the renowned frescoes of Szigetvár), Alajos Ettinger (then just out of his job at Vác, a collaborator of Ganne), then Ferenc Kováts, an engineer and poet of the enlightenment. Despite being a freemason, however, Lajos Festetics was no enlightened humanist. There is no doubt that he made more advances with having his own sons educated (especially his second and third-born sons, Antal and Lajos jr.), ensuring that they would have a broader, more cultivated mind and successful careers. In order to support the latter, he often turned to Ferenc Széchényi, the husband of his niece Júlia, for assistance, and obtained official positions for his children. Antal Festetics was born in the house at Toponár. He was seven years old when his father purchased the estates of Dég and Szigetvár. Like his father, he proudly clung to his status in the gentry, sustaining the minority complex in the shadow of the Keszthely branch of the family. He was educated in botanics and agriculture in the Theresianum of the royal palace of Buda, together with János Nagyváthy and Pál Kitaibel both of whom he met there. His broad mindset was defined by the just awakening intellectual life of Pest-Buda. He struck up a friendship with László and József Orczy, became the right hand of the leader of the Hungarian freemasonry Captain Aigner, with whom he remained in contact after the movement had been banned. The documents of freemasonry Antal Festetics bought from Aigner were to become part of the material and spiritual legacy of the house of Dég. His friendship with the Orczy family had life-long consequences. He chose a wife from the Orczy family: in 1801, he married the niece of his friends, the Baroness Amélia Splényi. The landscape garden intended for public use László Orczy started to build in 1794 had a definitive effect on Antal. In 1799, he bought building sites next to the Orczy-garden, and built the most impressing house of Pest and a garden to match the one next door. In 1802, following the example set by the Orczys again, he purchased the second largest apartment building of Pest, the so-called Moroccan Court. (The largest apartment building was the famous Orczy-House.) The yearly income of 30,000 HUF thus obtained provided a secure financial foundation to Festetics’s later projects and the clearance of his debts. When his father died unexpectedly in 1797, he was the oldest surviving son. Dég became his property by way of a property exchange within the family, and his family also entrusted him with the common debt of 550,000 HUF, trusting his managerial ability. The sparsely populated estate had excellent potential, and it fell on Antal to create a modern agricultural farm on it. Having finished the villa and garden at Pest (which I would put at 1808-1809). Antal Festetics began another building project in the middle of the Mezőföld plains. Ferenc Kováts, poet and translator became the supervisor of the estate at Dég and there is little doubt as to his influence over establishing the modern road network and his lion’s share in solving the technical problems arising during the building of the park. The inheritance lawsuit against György Festetics between 1810 and 1817 provides a basis of comparison between the building projects and gardens of Keszthely and Dég. There is no doubt that the residence of Antal Festetics at Dég was far superior to the country house at Keszthely and the Georgikon, both in terms of architectural modernity and quality of landscape gardening. One can even say that Antal Festetics’s ambitions in creating his house and park equaled those of György Festetics and his library. To put it simply: Antal focused his activities on his own estate, while his cousin channeled his efforts to the public good. The name of Mihály Pollack appeared at the building of the villa at Pest, and we have positive proof that Pollack had a hand in the Dég-project: a description dated to 1812 names the master of buildings almost finished by that time. The same description provides details about the decorative paint and furnishings of the house. Pollack has a chance to learn about landscape gardens during the years he spent in Milan with his brother Leopold, when he participated in the designing and building of the gardens of the Villa Belgioioso. The park of Dég, however, differs from the gardens of Milan both in terms of volume and in intellectual background. Bernhard Petri (1767–1853), one of the most superior landscape gardener and agriculture professional, played a definitive part in creating the park at Dég. This is recorded in the documents of Bartosságh. Petri’s attitude to the Horatian principle of utile dulci (the useful together with what is pleasant, beautiful) was akin to that of his client Antal Festetics. Petri applied this principle to his gardens and the landscape of Mezőföld which had been without trees up to that point.

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