Sunshine After Rain: Two Centuries of Treasures at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Celebration of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ 200th anniversary

The commemorative exhibition invites visitors to trace two centuries of Hungarian intellectual ambition – from its literary birth to its scientific brilliance – through paintings, manuscripts, codices and rare artefacts of international importance. The exhibition features some of the most significant works from the Academy’s own art collection.

Significant paintings

At the heart of the exhibition is Johann Nepomuk Ender’s The Coat of Arms of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1834), commissioned by the Academy’s founder, Count István Széchenyi. Ender’s allegorical composition, with its enigmatic female figure and the motto “Borúra derű” (Sunshine after Rain), forms both the exhibition’s title and its symbolic core.

Photo: mta.hu / Tamás Szigeti

The painting blends mythology and national aspiration – the woman’s gesture of offering a cup to an eagle evokes both divine favour and renewal, while on the shield the meeting of Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun recalls the complex heritage from which modern Hungary sought legitimacy.

In the next room hangs Friedrich von Amerling’s stately portrait of Count István Széchenyi (1836), who laid the foundation for the establishment of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was painted in Vienna and donated by the count’s brothers. Amerling, one of the Habsburg Empire’s foremost portraitists, captures Széchenyi as the archetypal reformer: noble, visionary and self-possessed. The painting’s theatrical grandeur – from the count’s richly embroidered attire to the imagined marble architecture behind him – reflects both his social standing and his pivotal role in founding the Academy. A complementary work by Amerling, Count János Waldstein in Spanish Costume (1833), adds a cosmopolitan touch, showing a youthful aristocrat in Renaissance dress – a nod to the learned humanist ideals that animated the Academy’s early years.

Another highlight is Viktor Madarász’s 1864 portrait of Amédée Thierry, the French historian whose theory of the Huns’ connection to the Hungarians once shaped national identity. Madarász, then living in Paris, presented the portrait to the Academy as a diplomatic gift, reflecting both intellectual admiration and the transnational dialogue between Hungarian and Western European scholarship in the nineteenth century.

Equally significant are the four portraits once owned by László Bártfay, a key figure in Hungary’s Reform Era cultural circles. Works by Anton Einsle and Miklós Barabás depict literary and political luminaries such as Ferenc Kölcsey, who wrote Hungary’s national anthem, Mihály Vörösmarty, who wrote the nation’s “second national anthem” called Szózat, Baron Miklós Wesselényi and Ferenc Deák. Displayed together, these canvases form a pantheon of Hungarian modernisation – the faces of writers and statesmen who helped define the moral and intellectual identity of a nation on the cusp of transformation.

Barabás’s later works trace this spirit of civic devotion into the Academy’s institutional maturity. His Count Emil Dessewffy (1866) portrays the Academy’s second president amid books and globes, symbols of scholarly authority, while Count György Károlyi (1878), commissioned posthumously, commemorates one of the institution’s founders and earliest benefactors. Both paintings attest to Barabás’s mastery of the refined, realist idiom that became the visual language of Hungarian public life.

A rare allegorical piece, Giovanni Simonetti’s The City of Fiume Honours Historian László Szalay (1861), celebrates a moment when scholarship and politics directly intersected. Commissioned by the city’s leaders, the work depicts a symbolic female figure engraving Szalay’s name in stone. It was a tribute to civic gratitude and national unity, a kind of thank you to the city leaders of Fiume, who at that time happened to be mostly Hungarian.

The exhibition also includes devotional and dynastic pieces that expand the story of Hungarian patronage. Filippo Agricola’s Madonna with Jesus and Saint John the Baptist (1819), once owned by Széchenyi himself, recalls the Renaissance models that inspired Central European collectors. Alajos Strobl’s bronze bust of Archduke Joseph Karl (1892) represents a later era, when science and nobility intertwined – the Archduke being both a member of the Habsburg family and a pioneering scholar of Roma studies.

Together, these paintings form a portrait of the Academy as both a scientific institution and a national shrine of remembrance. They chart a journey from the Romantic idealism of Hungary’s Reform Era to the complex interplay between intellect, power and identity that shaped modern Central Europe. Through these paintings and sculptures, the exhibition restores visibility to the people and ideas that defined an era when art served not merely as ornament, but as a declaration of faith in progress after the storms of history.

Significant manuscripts, codices and rare artefacts

The beginning of this section of the exhibition pays tribute to two men who laid the Academy’s foundations.

Count István Széchenyi, one of the country’s most enlightened reformers, famously pledged his annual income in 1825 to support the cultivation of the Hungarian language, marking what is now recognised as the Academy’s birthday.

Alongside him stands Count József Teleki, who in 1826 donated his vast family library of 30,000 volumes, as well as 600 manuscripts and 400 incunabula, to create what became the Academy’s Library. These two acts of generosity embodied Hungary’s 19th-century drive for cultural self-determination within the Habsburg Empire.

Among the first objects to greet visitors are Széchenyi’s original manuscripts of his great reformist works – Hitel, Világ and Stádium – which defined Hungary’s modernisation agenda. Nearby are the volumes of Teleki’s monumental twelve-volume history on 15^th-century Hungary and the Library’s crown jewel: a 15th-century Corvina manuscript, once part of King Matthias Corvinus’s legendary royal library. In his time, Matthias possessed one of Europe’s largest humanist collections, second only to the Vatican’s. The surviving Corvinae today rank among the continent’s finest Renaissance treasures, linking Hungarian scholarship with the intellectual heart of Europe.

Photo: mta.hu / Tamás Szigeti

The Zára Prayer Book, from the early 11th century, is the oldest codex in the collection, while the enigmatic Rohonc Codex – a mysterious, undeciphered manuscript that continues to baffle linguists and cryptographers – provides a link between Hungarian lore and one of the world’s enduring philological puzzles, often compared to Yale’s Voynich Manuscript. The Library’s single leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz around 1456, anchors Hungary’s collection within the universal story of printing and the spread of literacy.

As a centre of linguistic and literary study, the Academy spearheaded early efforts to standardise and enrich the Hungarian language. The exhibition displays the first dictionaries published under its aegis and the earliest printed works in Hungarian, including Benedek Komjáti’s 1533 translation of St Paul’s Epistles – the first book ever printed entirely in the national tongue.

Hungarian literature’s rise to prominence is marked through a succession of manuscripts by poets and thinkers whose words shaped the national identity. Among them, none resonates more deeply than Mihály Vörösmarty’s Szózat (Appeal), displayed here in its original manuscript form.

Photo: mta.hu / Tamás Szigeti

Written in 1836, Szózat is often called Hungary’s “second national anthem” – a rousing invocation to unity and perseverance that is still recited at state ceremonies. To Hungarian ears, it occupies the same spiritual ground as Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”.

Complementing this is the newly added display of Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man (1861), one of the greatest works of European dramatic literature. Madách’s philosophical play, often compared to Goethe’s Faust, follows Adam and Eve across epochs of human civilisation, questioning progress, freedom and the moral purpose of humanity. Its inclusion underscores the Academy’s dual devotion to artistic imagination and intellectual inquiry. For readers worldwide, The Tragedy of Man stands as Hungary’s most profound contribution to the universal drama of human destiny.

While the Academy’s founders were primarily humanists, Borúra derű also honours the scientists who transformed Hungarian scholarship into a global force. One exhibit celebrates Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, who, in the 1820s, walked from Hungary to India in search of the nation’s Asian origins. His pioneering Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book, produced under extreme hardship, laid the foundations of modern Tibetology and remain milestones in global linguistic research.

Another highlight is the manuscript of János Bolyai’s Appendix, the work that introduced non-Euclidean geometry to the world. Added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009, Bolyai’s mathematical revolution paralleled Copernicus’s upheaval in astronomy and remains a cornerstone of modern geometry and theoretical physics.

In the 20th century, the Academy weathered war and political turbulence, finding renewed strength under figures such as composer Zoltán Kodály, who led it after the Second World War. His correspondence with Béla Bartók, also on display, attests to the intertwining of science and culture in Hungarian intellectual life. Manuscripts and awards connected with contemporary luminaries including Abel laureates László Lovász and Endre Szemerédi and Nobel prize winners Katalin Karikó and Ferenc Krausz also are part of the exhibition.

Photo: mta.hu / Tamás Szigeti

Considered as a whole, the inspiring exhibition tells the story of a nation’s intellectual journey from cultural subjugation to global contribution.