“Our reconciliation essentially means that we pay attention to the other person, we pay attention to nature, and we pay attention to ourselves. This threefold attitude is the essence: love for our fellow human beings, love for the entire living and non-living world, and love for ourselves. If we consciously commit to these, life-giving symbols will begin to flow toward us, the terrible threat of alienation will disappear, and we will create a new social environment.” (Katalin Dávid)
Katalin Dávid was born on 16 August 1923 in Szeged. She completed her secondary studies there in 1941, then attended university and earned her doctoral degree in the humanities in 1948, specializing in art history, aesthetics, and archaeology. After deciding that she wished to focus on Christian, sacred iconography, she also completed studies in Catholic theology.
Her professional work and scholarly views were shaped by her devout Christian values, the inhuman destruction of the Second World War, the crimes committed against the Jewish people, the cultural policies of the atheist dictatorship, and the continuous weakening of artistic traditions and art-historical knowledge. Over the course of her career, alongside her multifaceted scholarly activity (in theology, art history, cultural history, archaeology, and museology), she also carried out academic organizational work that was outstanding in the context of Hungarian art history. Her public engagement has been exemplary for seven decades. Embodying the spirit of Christianity, she maintained even in the darkest years of the dictatorship that “what matters is never that someone thinks differently from me, but that we find common ground.”
Already as a university student, she stood out for her organizational skills and active involvement. She served as the president of the Mária Kongregáció (Marian Congregation) in Szeged and as the national vice-president of the Magyar Egyetemisták és Főiskolások Országos Szövetsége – MEFESZ (National Union of Hungarian University and College Students). She launched a new Catholic social program to aid the poor and the dispossessed, from which the “mezítlábas mozgalom” (“barefoot movement”) grew in Szeged, supporting impoverished students with no financial means. Together with Jesuit Father István Endrődy, she directed the publishing house Veritas. At the age of twenty-one, she was already the editor of Sándor Bálint’s mariological work, for which she also coined the title Boldogasszony vendégségében (As a Guest of Our Blessed Lady). The renowned scholar dedicated his book to Katalin Dávid as the Godchild of Our Lady.
In 1947, her cousin, the painter Jenő Barcsay (1900–1988), introduced her – then a final-year university student – to the art historian Károly Lyka (1869–1965). Following his advice, in addition to art history she turned her attention toward the study of iconography and symbolism. She was also influenced in this direction by the newly established communist dictatorship, which practically prevented travel abroad and thus the study of European art. As a result, her interest increasingly focused on researching images and symbols in Christian and Jewish culture. Her key mentors included Károly Kerényi (classical philology, ancient Greek culture), Sándor Sík (aesthetics), Sándor Bálint (ethnography, religious ethnography, cultural history), and Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (art history). Among her friends were Sándor Scheiber, Imre Makovecz, and Béla Kondor, for whom she and János Pilinszky often posed as models. All of them contributed, directly or indirectly, to shaping her holistic approach to the subjects she studied and to ensuring that her writings did not remain confined solely to the boundaries of academic discourse. Through her scholarly work, she pursued a more complex mission: to preserve and improve culture and art, to educate and enlighten people.
At the very beginning of her scholarly career, in 1948, she worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Szeged and later as an employee of the Museum of Fine Arts, from which she was dismissed on charges of “clerical reaction”. At that point, Máriusz Rabinovszky (1895–1953) – one of the leading figures in reorganizing Hungarian art-historical scholarship after World War II and head of the Art History Department at the Academy of Fine Arts – secured permission from the Ministry of Public Education to establish a new institute for her. Thus, in 1950, the Művészettörténeti Dokumentációs Központ (Art History Documentation Centre) – the predecessor of the MTA Művészettörténeti Kutatóintézet (Art History Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) – was founded. From 1954 onward, Dávid Katalin served as its director, effectively creating the foundation for modern art-historical research in Hungary. Her work in academic organization also became fundamental, particularly in the coordination and leadership of nationwide archival and bibliographic research related to art history. As head of the Art History Documentation Centre, she maintained professional contact with almost all the leading art historians of today, many of whom regard her as their mentor. Her institute employed some of the most significant figures in the field – among them Jolán Balogh, Antal Kampis, Mária Bernáth, István Genthon, Magdolna Supka, Lajos Németh, Géza Entz Sr., and László Zolnay. Alongside them, she also employed monks and priests for archival research, as they possessed the necessary Latin knowledge to read medieval sources. Thanks to this, the internationally renowned institute came to be known in Rome as “the union of priests”. She launched the careers of many talented young scholars (e.g., Ernő Marosi, László Beke, József Takács). Through the revived European School surrounding the Documentation Centre, she maintained close professional and personal relationships with figures such as Jenő Barcsay and Béla Kondor, and in the “Építészpince” (Architects’ Cellar) she belonged to a circle that also included János Pilinszky and the Vujicsics brothers. At this time, she was one of the intellectual leaders of modern Hungarian artists. She was eventually removed from the institute on fabricated charges, accused of clerical reaction, a Vatican conspiracy, and Jesuit plotting. Her name was removed from the title pages of several volumes she had already edited and prepared for publication.
From 1966 onward, she worked as a senior research fellow at the Hungarian National Museum, and later at the Hungarian National Gallery. In 1969, as relations between the Hungarian state and the churches began to ease, the Egyházi Gyűjtemények Szaktanácsadói Testülete (Advisory Committee for Church Collections) was established. At the request of Cardinal Casaroli and the Catholic Church, Katalin Dávid was appointed to lead it. Through her work, numerous ecclesiastical and denominational museums, collections, and treasuries were opened or renewed. Her name is closely associated with the treasury and the Christian Museum in Esztergom, the treasury in Kalocsa, the Reformed museums in Sárospatak and Pápa, the Jewish Museum in Budapest, as well as the restoration of countless smaller ecclesiastical monuments. With her unquestionable scholarly authority and international standing, she achieved something unique in the socialist region: in contrast to neighbouring socialist countries, church-owned artworks and treasures in Hungary remained under ecclesiastical or denominational ownership. She also served as an expert in the return of the Holy Crown to Hungary and ensured that the Crown would be placed not in a museum exhibition but under the guardianship of Parliament.
Katalin Dávid wrote her candidate’s dissertation in 1973, entitled Az Árpád-kori Csanád vármegye művészeti topográfiájának rekonstrukciója (Reconstruction of the Artistic Topography of Csanád County in the Árpád Era), and she became a Candidate of Art History in 1974. At the invitation of Cardinal László Lékai, she taught iconography and typology for twenty-two years, from 1978 onward, as a professor in the newly launched correspondence program of the Pázmány Péter Theological Academy.
She organized or contributed to the organization of several large-scale exhibitions, including the permanent exhibitions of the Cathedral Treasuries of Esztergom and Kalocsa, Egyházi gyűjtemények kincsei (Treasures of Church Collections) of the Museum of Applied Arts, 1979, Corvinák (The Corvinas) (1968), and Magyarország története a Honfoglalástól 1849-ig (The History of Hungary from the Conquest to 1849) (1967) of the Hungarian National Museum.
She edited several yearbooks and series: the Magyar Művészettörténeti Munkaközösség Évkönyve (Yearbook of the Hungarian Art History Working Group) (1952–53), Művészettörténeti Tanulmányok (Art Historical Studies) (1953–1960), and the Művészettörténeti Dokumentációs Központ Közleményei (Bulletin of the Art History Documentation Centre) (1962–1964). A major achievement was the launch of the series Mai magyar művészet (Contemporary Hungarian Art) at the publishing house of the Képzőművészeti Alap Kiadóvállalat (Fine Arts Fund) in 1970. She published hundreds of studies and books in Hungarian, English, and German.
In the first phase of her seven-decade career, she presented the life and art of several outstanding figures in monographs, including Gustave Courbet (1953); Van Gogh, whose letters she also translated (1963); Marc Chagall (1966); Henry Moore (1968), who personally wished to send works for the volume; József Engelsz (1972); Masaccio (1972); and Margit Anna (1980). She also wrote about a thousand years of Hungarian–Polish friendship (1978), during which she came into contact with the then Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła. Her volumes presenting museum art collections and monuments – such as Pannonhalma (1968) – are of particular importance. Her work also focused on medieval and early modern (16–18th century) Hungarian art history, typology, the reconstruction of destroyed medieval monuments, and modern Hungarian art (20th century).
The culmination of her oeuvre is formed by her art-historical works and writings about sacred art, composed with a holistic perspective that spans cultures and religions. These could only be published after five decades of work, beginning in the 1990s. Her scholarly achievements cannot be separated from her lifelong mission in service of Christian culture. Through her studies, in which she embraces universal Christian art and cultural history holistically, she also confronts the value system present in contemporary European culture that pushes Christianity to the margins. As she wrote in her late work Egy keresztény értelmiség Európára néz (A Christian Intellectual Looks at Europe) (2013), her aim is “to find an explanation for the observable fact that today’s Europe has denied, abandoned, and even seeks to relegate to the margins of life the Christianity that shaped its very existence, formed its conduct and moral foundations, determined its historical traditions, unfolded its distinctive European culture, and gave roots to all of these”.
In her 2006 volume Kereszténység és Kultúra (Christianity and Culture), she examines the relationship between Christianity and culture across eras and regions, exploring the reasons behind the enduring wounds suffered by Christian culture – from antiquity, through missionary movements and totalitarian regimes, to our own society. She emphasizes that symbols were transmitted unchanged until the eighteenth century, and that their degeneration began only in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, when politics subordinated symbols to its own purposes. Upon this distortion was built institutionalized secularization, which tore individuals away from their inherited morality and rendered them rootless. From this point on, previously exclusively sacred symbols – such as the swastika, the star, or the cross – began to acquire pseudo-symbolic meanings.
She analyses Christianity itself through its symbols, along with its transformations and the development of the surrounding culture. Her volume A teremtett világ misztériuma. Bibliai jelképek kézikönyve (The Mystery of the Created World. A Handbook of Biblical Symbols), which she compiled, is a groundbreaking contribution to the history of Christian culture in Hungary. It surveys the symbols of the Bible, providing their meanings in both the Old and the New Testament, as well as their appearances in early Christianity. Her aim extends beyond the scholarly study of iconography and symbols; she seeks to provide a wake-up call in an age when the understanding of symbols – and thereby of art, religion, and culture – is becoming the privilege of an increasingly narrow community, a time when “we are speaking of the last moment before the disappearance of symbols”. In her frustration over the fate of culture and Christianity, she remarks that in the contemporary world “objects do appeal to people with their artistic design, but in terms of their meaning they speak to almost no one, though they are symbols bearing meaning: the sanctuary lamp, the sanctuary itself, the altar, the tabernacle, etc. – even if people know whom the Eucharist contains, they do not know what redemption means. … Things have not become symbols, and so their meaning has remained unarticulated – ineffective, empty objects. Thus, faith has remained trapped in the realm of emotion and receives no help in crossing into the domain of the intellect.” She maintains that knowledge of biblical symbols is not dependent on religious affiliation; rather, as the basis of our cultural literacy, it is a criterion of culture itself. In addition to uncovering the causes of this loss, she considers the elimination of our society’s illiteracy in this field to be equally essential. She argues that the loss of symbols has become one of the causes of the cultural and social errors experienced by everyone. From the perspective of the individual, it has produced spiritual distortions through which – as a natural consequence of losing symbols – access to our inner world has been lost, along with the path to the sacred, an inherent component of the human being that exists a priori in all of us as an archetype.
“The natural consequence of the loss of symbols has been the new illiteracy of the twentieth century, which has shut people off from visual language – from what is visible, readable, and audible in visual culture. This makes us far poorer than if someone ‘only’ could not read and write, for it attacks the human senses, those that receive messages. For it is not only the images of the medieval church that we fail to understand, but even the polluted stream…”
Of outstanding importance and regarded as a foundational work in European Mariological scholarship is her volume Egy asszony, öltözete a Nap (A Woman, Clothed with the Sun) (2008). This book – unique even within international scholarship – offers a systematic presentation of the iconography of the Virgin Mary through the comparison of written sources and works of visual art, providing an iconographic analysis of the representations of Mary’s life and their biblical prototypes.
A similarly holistic work, comparable in its line of thought and editorial principles, is her 2011 monograph A kereszt teológiai és ikonográfiai értelmezése az első évezredben (The Theological and Iconographic Interpretation of the Cross in the First Millenium). This study explores the representations of the Cross and their biblical foreshadowings from the Christ monograms in the catacombs to the monumental decorations of cathedrals at the end of the first millennium. It highlights the interrelated characteristics of the iconography, symbolic meaning, and theology of the Cross, and the correspondence between doctrine and representation. She aims to contribute to the documentation of the universality of the Cross of Christ.
Alongside these fundamental research works, she continually kept in sight the ultimate goal to be realized also through her scholarly activity: the preservation of our Christian cultural heritage. As she emphasizes in the final pages of her book, this is necessary because “the present situation is similar to that of the first Christians, for to today’s heavily secularized world the Christian message is at least as unfamiliar as it was to the pagan society at the beginning”. She regards symbols as archetypes that have lived together with humanity, instruments through which God works.
In 2014, her volume Soah – Emlékeim a vészkorszak idejéből (Soah – Memories from the Time of the Holocaust) was published, offering insight into her forthcoming memoirs.
She also undertook public roles. After the Second World War, she served as president of the Marian Congregation in Szeged and as national vice-president of the Magyar Egyetemisták és Főiskolások Országos Szövetsége (MEFESZ – National Association of Hungarian University and College Students). Since 1949, she had been a founding member of the Magyar Képzőművészek Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Fine Artists), later becoming secretary of its Művészeti Írói Szakosztály (Section of Art Writers). From 1997, she was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, and she also belonged as a full member to the Szent István Tudományos Akadémia (Saint Stephen Academy of Sciences).
Her professional and personal authority, as well as the example she set, is reflected in the volume Ex invisibilibus visibilia, published for her 70th birthday, in which leading figures of Hungarian theology, art history, the arts, historical studies, archaeology, literature, and religious life contributed in her honour. On the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Pope John Paul II welcomed her in a private audience and greeted her with a personally signed diploma. She received numerous awards and distinctions, among them the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (as its first recipient, 2013), the Prima Award (2010), the Grand Medal of the Saint Adalbert Award (2005), the Stephanus Award (2003), the Széchenyi Prize (1995), and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (1993). Among all these, special mention should be made that in 1993, Katalin Dávid received from Pope John Paul II the highest papal honour that can be awarded to laypeople, the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Gold Cross, in recognition of her scholarly efforts toward the reconciliation of Judaism and Christianity and for her activities in rescuing Jews in Szeged during the Holocaust.
[2016]