Ferenc Szerafin Zichy

About ninety-eight Cypriot objects in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, carry the name of Count Ferenc Zichy, and the account of how he came by them is his own family's recollection. B. Csornay-Caprez, who catalogued the collection in 2000, reports that the great majority of the pieces were obtained in Cyprus by Zichy during a joint visit with Austen Henry Layard, "according to the Zichy family's undocumented recollection"¹. She cites J. Gy. Szilágyi, in a 1996 work by Barkóczi, for the story and gives no document for the journey¹.

A career in public office

Zichy was born on 24 January 1811 in Pozsony (Bratislava) and died on 17 July 1900 at Káloz^2,3. Hungarian Wikipedia outlines a long public career: law, county offices, imperial commissioner in 1848-49, steward of Archduke Maximilian's court at Venice from 1854, and Master of the Treasury (tárnokmester) in 1888. He also presided over the Hungarian Horticultural Society³. From 1874 to 1879 he was the Monarchy's Internuncio at Constantinople^1,3.

The visit to Cyprus

Csornay-Caprez supports the family story by pointing to the overlap of Zichy's Constantinople posting with Layard's term as British ambassador there, 1877 to 1880. Britain took over Cyprus in 1878, and she proposes 1878-79 as the most probable date for the visit¹. The date is her inference. No place on the island is named, and the catalogue records the pieces only as acquired in Cyprus, without findspots¹.

She says the "overwhelming majority" came this way, which leaves some of the Cypriot pieces in Budapest to other sources¹.

Where the objects went

Csornay-Caprez writes that soon after his return Zichy sold or donated several pieces to Hungarian museums, among them the Hungarian National Museum, citing Hampel 1902, and the Museum of Applied Arts. She does not say which pieces were sales and which gifts¹. Under the Museums' Act of 1934 the items passed to the Museum of Fine Arts¹.

The rest stayed in the family until 1948, when the Museum of Fine Arts bought them from his heiress, Mrs György Széchenyi (Anasztázia Széchenyi, née Zichy)¹. A guide by J. Gy. Szilágyi accompanied the first exhibition that year¹. The catalogue's provenance lines credit roughly 67 pieces to the 1948 purchase and 21 to the Museum of Applied Arts, with about eight transferred from the Savaria Museum at Szombathely in 1951 and two from the István Király Museum at Székesfehérvár¹.

The collection is mostly pottery and terracottas. Its one limestone sculpture is a late Archaic fragment of a mother with child, 11.8 cm high, inventory SzM 50.99^1,4.