Succus Prudentiae: Hevenesi Gábor neosztoikus emblémáinak festészeti recepciója

Abstract

The Hungarian Jesuit Gábor (Gabriel) Hevenesi’s emblem book Succus prudentiae (The Seed of Wisdom) was published in 1690 in Vienna and then in 1701 in Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia), containing fifty emblems. He compiled a collection of Christian wisdom and virtues with the help of quotations and paraphrases from the Stoic philosopher Seneca. In this article, I present two instances of applied emblematic reception of the emblems of Hevenesi’s Succus prudentiae in Transylvanian buildings. The first example is the painted decoration of a room in the castle of Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania). The program survived only in fragments, yet, three emblems could still be identified. The use of a Jesuit emblem book points towards the conception of the decorative program during the Habsburg occupation of the castle during the first half of the eighteenth century. The second example is the former wall and furniture decoration of the Daniel manor house in Szasznagyvesszős (Michelsdorf/Veseuș, Romania). The inner decoration of this building was destroyed before the twentieth century, but it was preserved by the detailed description of the writer József Ponori Thewrewk from 1817. Based on his account, the walls and several pieces of furniture (including a folding screen and a cabinet) were decorated with Hevenesi’s emblems. This program was most possibly ordered by István Daniel the elder, a state official during the Habsburg rule in Transylvania. As an appendix, I draw attention to a surviving cabinet with emblematic paintings based on Jesuit Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria , now in the collection of the Sárospatak Catholic Museum.