ancestors' gallery

Family galleries of portraits representing the ideals of the nobility, whose main purpose was to demonstrate the noble origins of the new aristocracy by showing its ancestry. The fact that these portraits were strongly rooted in local Hungarian traditions was, in a way, a protest against the newly created regime of the Habsburg house. The depicted persons wear Hungarian noblemen's costumes, and this tradition remained unchanged even in the first half of the eighteenth century. The style of the ancestors' galleries had a decisive influence also on foreign artists working in Hungary in the field of portraiture.

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