Following six years of preparatory work, the first major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Giacomo Marastoni was inaugurated on 18 June at the Budapest History Museum: “An Italian in Pest – Giacomo Marastoni (1804–1860) and the first Hungarian Academy of painting”.
Giacomo Marastoni – or Jakab Marastoni, as he was known in Hungarian – was born in Venice in 1804 and studied at the renowned Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. After travelling to Austria, he moved to Pozsony (present-day Bratislava, Slovakia) in 1833, and later settled in Pest in 1836, where he remained until his death in 1860. Marastoni became actively involved in Hungary’s reform era, working as a portraitist during the Diets of Pozsony and Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania), and received commissions over several decades from both noble and bourgeois families. In 1846, he founded his innovative institution: the First Hungarian Academy of Painting.
The exhibition features 240 works of art from 28 public and ecclesiastical collections across four countries, including several pieces on display for the first time, alongside contributions from private collectors. The selection traces the life and artistic development of Giacomo Marastoni, from his early years in Venice and Vienna to his time in Pozsony and Pest. Alongside Miklós Barabás, Marastoni was considered one of the leading portraitists of Hungary during the late Reform Era and was also among the first to experiment with the daguerreotype technique. His private institute represented the most significant forerunner of the state-run art education system formally established in 1871.
This exhibition marks the first comprehensive attempt to retrace the oeuvre of Jakab Marastoni. In addition to the holdings of the Budapest History Museum’s Fine Arts Collection and the Metropolitan Art Gallery, the exhibition showcases loans from major national institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery and the Hungarian National Museum.
The opening was also attended by Dr Elisabetta Barisoni (Director of the Museums Area – Head of MUVE Mestre, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia) and Professor Riccardo Caldura (Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice).
