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 , 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 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 . 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. Petri’s multi-disciplinarian life’s work, extending to many countries in Central Europe, has been hitherto not known in its entirety. He is the other protagonist of this dissertation. In order to better understand Petri’s work at Dég, it was necessary to take a complex look at his biography. Beside German and Czech publications of latter years, his detailed autobiography uncovered by research gives the most information. A number of his designs and portraits have also been found. Petri was born into a prosperous and respected gardening dynasty. His father was the gardening manager and agricultural advisor of the Duke of Pfalz. After the loss of his wife, Bernhard left his son’s education in the duke’s hands, hoping that son would follow father and (as the duke was also due to inherit the Bavarian throne) ultimately become the manager of Bavarian royal estates and gardens. Petri was sent to educational tour in England where he got acquainted with the leading gardeners, garden planners, agricultural professionals and natural scientists of the period. He had the queen’s personal permission to see the crown estates. His lately found English garden plans testify to his travel experiences. Upon his return home, he started working on the grandiose garden of Karlsberg. In February 1793 Petri had to leave due to French military attacks. He went to Vienna where leading freemasons received him and entrusted him with garden design and architectural tasks. His first client was Mihály Viczay, for whom he built a landscape garden at Hédervár in 10 weeks. His gardens in Hungary (Ráró, Vedrőd, the Orczy Garden of Pest) are numbered among the well-known and valued works of Hungarian garden history. From his autobiography, we are aware of Petri’s designs drawn up

for Margaret Island, too. From his hitherto unknown Austrian works, the gardens for duke Johann von Liechtenstein are the most important, but these are surpassed by the ones he created for the duke between 1805 and 1808 after the duke had inherited the entirety of the Liechtenstein estate. Petri started a huge project to modernize and develop every estate in , Chechia and Moravia. He was the duke’s leading manager in forestry, agriculture, and horticulture, supervising the works from Vienna. Castles, ornamental buildings, new roads and gardens were created under his management. His main work, the radical rebuilding of the park of Eisgrub is dated to this period. Today, the park is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape. All that work soon consumed Petri’s strength, and he asked to be retired in 1808. His career stalled, but he was already working on breeding the flock of merino sheep he smuggled out of Spain and on developing his own estate in Lower Austria, in Theresienfeld – all the while calling himself a sheep breeder. As a busy agricultural innovator and successful careerist, Petri welcomed the commission from Antal Festetics to work on the house and gardens of Dég. This was a project matching his personal ambitions, with a predictably successful result. Driven by his education and multiple career breaks, Petri was driven to draw attention to himself with grandiose works from time to time. He certainly obliged Festetics with a visit to Dég in 1812, but the Bavarian ruler Maximilian invited him in vain to fill the post intended for him since his childhood. The royal Bavarian gardens were ultimately managed by Petri’s teacher Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell.

Main research results

The focus of the dissertation is Antal Festetics himself. Having described his father’s financial situation and ambitions, and Antal’s own education and works, I elaborated on how he became the richest of the Hungarian gentry. He achieved this status in spite of his debts and the insecurities of the Napoleonic Wars, thanks to his well-timed investments and personal ambitions. These ambitions spurred him on to create a house at Dég in the late 1810s that would merit the labels “greatest”, “beyond compare”, “unsurpassable”. Based on the media mentions of the period, I can prove that the composition of the gardens at Dég is, at least in part, the work of Bernhard Petri, one of the most significant Central-European garden architects. Agricultural journals – to which Petri and the ubiquitous József Bartosságh contributed often – wrote multiple times about the parks of Dég and Antal Festetics. I have managed to identify the most detailed description of the house and gardens as being the work of Petri. Sources uncovered by the latest research have greatly increased the data about the history of Dég, the estate and its center: the country house and gardens. The journal entries and published praises in the manuscript are joined by registers, letters, wills, etc. found in the Budapest archives. These supplement the lost documents of the sadly destroyed Festetics archives of Dég. The wills of Kristóf Festetics, Lajos and his widow, and Antal tell a long tale about personal ambitions and family relationships, revealing a number of connections regarding Dég (such as the origins of the orange trees of Dég – these come from Toponár). The maps I have uncovered

and analyzed in detail, the multitude of aerial photographs all helped define the historical structure of the park. The direct influence of the English Stowe on the latter is undeniable, joined by Petri’s drawings made during his travels in England. The situation and composition of the gardens of Dég were greatly influenced by the geomorphological attributes of the site – these were so similar to those of Stowe’s gardens, even Pollack or Antal Festetics could feel the connection. The conscious development of the Dég estate extended well beyong the house and garden, resulting in transformations of the wider landscape. The 20,000 acres of the entire estate can be regarded as a unified composition thanks to the tree-lined network of roads and farms. The house was built in the southern end of the 12 km long main road (the so-called post road). The northern end was occupied by the building complex of Ecsi, while the Roman Catholic church designed by Pollack was situated in the axis of the Káloz road. In the church’s case I proved that the tower was placed above the sanctuary later, most probably at Petri’s instigation. This caused a slight crack in the united nature of the composition, overwriting Pollack’s architectural vision for the sake of a full view from the house. Finally, I describe Antal Festetics’s later acquisitions and investments, taking a detour to the building of the house in Pest, designed by Mihály Pollack. The investment portfolio is now complete with a house in the capital, an apartment building, a villa in a park on the outskirts of the city, and a grand residence in the countryside. Looping back to the backstory I propose that the streets around Antal’s house in Pest (Zrínyi Street, Nádor Street) were named in 1847 with a deliberate nod to Antal Festetics’s family cult: the Croatian-Hungarian hero has been revered since the 18th century, while Palatine Joseph had to be acknowledged as the key person in the economic and cultural context of the time. Heinrich Nebbien called him “the beautifier of Hungary.” It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence (and it is certainly of symbolic importance) that the house on the corner of these two streets was owned by Mihály Pollack. The effects of Bernhard Petri’s agricultural methods are still palpable in Europe, and thus in Hungary, too. Petri’s gardens in Central Europe belong to the most superior achievements of the garden history of their time, some of them are now officially part of the world heritage. Due to the information transmitted by József Bartosságh, we can look at the house and park at Dég in this context.

The author’s academic publications on the dissertation topic

Alföldy, Gábor, ʻThe precedents of the country house ensemble’ (ʻA kastélyegyüttes keletkezésének előzményei’); “The Park” (ʻA park’) in Sisa József – Alföldy Gábor: Dég, the Festetics-house and its Park (Dég, Festetics-kastély és parkja.) MÁG Műemlék-kalauzok. Budapest, 2006, 1, 11–24.

Alföldy, Gábor: ʻDég’; ʻPetri, Bernhard’ in Patrick Taylor (ed.): The Oxford Companion to the Garden. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 130–131; 376.

Alföldy Gábor, ʻThe history of the house at Dég’ (ʻA dégi kastélypark története’) A dégi Festetics-kastélyegyüttes. Műemlékvédelem 53 (2009), 1-2. szám, 49–68.

Alföldy, Gábor, ʻOrangeries and Other Greenhouses in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century’ in Orangeriekultur in Österreich, Ungarn und Tschechien. Schriftenreihe des Arbeitskreises Orangerien in Deutschland e. V. Band 10, Lukas Verlag, Berlin, 2014, pp. 82–112.

Alföldy Gábor: Dég, Festetics Park: The History and Conservation of a Hungarian Landscape Garden. (A dégi Festetics-kastélypark. Egy magyarországi tájkert története és helyreállítása.) Budapest, 2015.

Alföldy, Gábor: ʻLancelot ʻCapability’ Brown’s Impact on Landscape Design in Hungary’. Capability Brown: Perception and Response in a Global Context. Garden History 44, Suppl. 1 (Autumn 2016), 125–139.

Alföldy Gábor: ʻNew data about the history of Dég House and Park I: An Unknown Report of the site from 1812’ (ʻÚjabb adatok a dégi Festetics-kastélyegyüttes építéstörténetéhez I.: Egy ismeretlen útleírás Dégről, 1812-ből’) Ars Hungarica 44 (2018), 101–107.

Alföldy Gábor: ʻNew data about the history of Dég House and Park II: Bernhard Petr and Dég Park’ (ʻÚjabb adatok a dégi Festetics-kastélyegyüttes építéstörténetéhez II.: ʻBernhard Petri és a dégi park’) Ars Hungarica 45 (2019), 5–56.

Alföldy, Gábor: ʻ„Entweder als Oekonom oder als Künstler”: Die europäische Karriere des Landschaftsgärters und Agronomen Bernhard Petri’ Saarpfalz. Blätter für Geschichte und Volkskunde. Megjelenés alatt (2020).