“Conservation is at once a scientific and an artistic activity, and it demands limitless humility. I respect the work itself – the process by which it is made; the material with which I work; and the object, the creation itself, whose formal beauty and technical otherness are captivating. My principle is that, as far as our means allow, we must preserve all the beauty our predecessors created in their works of art. In my work, in conservation, I strive, with all my knowledge and at the highest level, to restore the object to its original state without altering the integrity of the conserved piece, its making-technique, or its ‘message’.” This is how Péter Varga, silversmith conservator-restorer, formulates his ars poetica.
His scientific and artistic interests began to take shape in early childhood. The example and work of his pharmacist father and teacher mother, almost naturally, awakened his curiosity for the sciences grounded in faith, while his father’s woodcarving opened before him the world of art and the process of artistic creation. From an early age, his outlook and ethical–artistic foundations were defined by his family’s Reformed (Calvinist) faith, by the example of his Reformed intellectual forebears (cantor-teacher, headmaster, teacher, lawyer), and by that of his immediate family – his mother and his father, who served as lay steward of the congregation.
His secondary-school years in Nagybátony, with the wide-ranging arts education and technical craft activities offered there, not only deepened his interest in the arts and art history but also awakened in him a desire to create. He studied a variety of craft techniques with keen attention, gradually focusing on the diverse methods and branches of metalwork. It was at school that he gained his first practical experience of working metal, and after his earliest attempts (table ornaments and ashtrays made from sheet steel), it became clear to him that his path lay in the silversmith’s craft and the art of the goldsmith. To lay the foundations of his technical training, he spent a one-month summer placement in the costume-jewellery unit of Hungarian Mint Ltd in Budapest; he was then admitted to a two-year course in silversmithing, where he acquired the basics of both the history of metalwork and the trade itself – learning the properties of different materials, metals and stones; the history and methods of their working; and a range of goldsmithing techniques. After qualifying, he returned to Hungarian Mint Ltd and, for a further year, deepened his expertise under the guidance of the ‘old masters’ of the profession there, naturally also acquiring specialised minting knowledge.
His desire for technical and artistic perfection increasingly drew his attention to ever more thorough mastery of historical goldsmithing techniques. Alongside the study of specialist literature, he visited museums with pleasure; he sought to reproduce the techniques and motifs he observed, as well as the objects he studied, in drawings and sample pieces. He further developed his drawing and modelling skills in the studio of the sculptor Dezső Fekete G. on Fő Street.
Beyond the masters of earlier centuries, his artistic formation and career were strongly influenced by his uncle, Dezső Varga, a painter-restorer at the Christian Museum in Esztergom, a lecturer in painting conservation at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and later its director.
Between 1972 and 1974, during the then-compulsory two-year military service – even though he could not practise in the workshop – he continued to deepen his knowledge by studying specialist literature on goldsmithing and metal conservation, increasingly orienting himself towards the conservator-restorer’s path. After demobilisation in August 1974, he joined the silversmith conservators’ workshop at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, founded at the end of 1949 by one of the profession’s outstanding figures, László Dömötör. In the museum workshop, alongside its founder, he continued to develop among renowned masters such as Joachim Szvetnik and Pál Kiss.
In 1975, he completed a one-year foundation course in conservation to acquire the basics of specialist knowledge; then, between 1976 and 1979, while carrying out day-to-day conservation work in the Museum of Applied Arts’ goldsmith-conservation workshop, he completed the silversmith conservator-restorer specialism by correspondence at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In parallel, he continued to study the works and techniques of earlier periods, the specialist literature and sources on individual making-techniques, and pursued ongoing self-education and professional experimentation grounded in theoretical acquisition and practical work. He aimed to use the tools of each period with ever greater mastery and to learn historical techniques as thoroughly as possible; thus, he seized the opportunity to take part in conservation work at the Museum of Applied Arts on the objects of the Esterházy treasury. From the late 1970s onwards, his distinctive conservator’s ‘handwriting’ and style emerged, founded on exceptionally rare technical expertise, deep material knowledge, and a perfect humility before the old masters and their works. The technical and craft knowledge he acquired over the years increasingly provided secure ground not only for his work as a conservator-artist – restoring the integrity of the old masters’ works or producing object copies (from materials matching the original and using the original techniques) – but also for the unfolding of his creativity, talent and sensitivity in independent artworks, designs, and realised pieces of goldsmithing. As a member of the Association of Hungarian Creative Artists (Magyar Alkotóművészek Egyesülete, later a public foundation), he was a regular presence at the artists’ houses in Zsennye and Hódmezővásárhely.
The example – and the desire – to transmit professional knowledge across generations accompanied him from early childhood, through his family. Between 1996 and 2000, he served as a specialist instructor in metalwork on the object-conservation programme at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and many younger students, under his guidance, deepened their expertise and completed their diploma projects. It is a striking, now-rare example of the transmission of professional knowledge, object-knowledge, and ‘workshop secrets’ shaped over long years of work, experimentation, and experience – recalling the world of medieval guilds. Among his former students was his daughter, Noémi Varga, a silversmith conservator-restorer, who carries forward her father’s professional legacy with the help of twenty-first-century materials-analysis methods.
Beyond teaching, Péter Varga always paid respectful tribute to his great predecessors – both goldsmiths and conservator-artists. He introduced their work to the profession and the wider public alike, both within formal education and through lectures. In addition, as a board member of the Joachim Szvetnik Foundation, he took part in compiling the exhibition material for the memorial house opened in 1997 in the master’s birthplace, in setting up the goldsmith’s workshop there, and in promoting knowledge of the oeuvre and work of Joachim Szvetnik (1927–1988).
At the Museum of Applied Arts, he first worked as an assistant conservator, then as a conservator, and later as a chief conservator. His daily work ranged from storage management and object cleaning to the conservation of a wide range of objects and materials in the collection (clocks, jewellery, bronze, copper, iron, etc.), and the cleaning and preservation of objects destined for exhibition.
Many decisive milestones in his outstanding career are linked to pieces from the Esterházy treasury. Early in his career, in 1975, he was tasked with restoring one of a pair of candlesticks made in 1710. For the young conservator, the restoration of the severely damaged object was an exceptional trial; it posed a technical challenge because the chased and repoussé foot of the candlestick was almost entirely crumpled, and the stem was deformed. Over the nearly year-long process, the remaining original reliefs provided crucial guidance. After completing this work, already in 1976, he undertook the conservation of a particularly exciting object from the Esterházy treasury: a seventeenth-century mirror made in Augsburg, fashioned in gilded silver, with a pierced silver sheet around its edges, fired enamel appliqués painted on kaolin, and ornamented with garnet and turquoise. Of the mirror surface set within the octagonal, faceted centre, only a few fragments at the edges survived.
His diploma project – an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his mastery of diverse materials and techniques – was likewise selected from among the damaged pieces of the Esterházy treasury. The object was a seventeenth-century flintlock carbine, broken into several pieces, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory, silver-inlaid (tausírozott), and fitted with a flintlock mechanism. During its year-and-a-half restoration, Ferenc Temesvári, an art historian and senior staff member of the Hungarian National Museum, then head of the museum’s arms collection, assisted him with the art-historical examination and research into analogies and the object’s history. Temesvári’s work and working method also influenced Varga’s later career.
A further outstanding milestone was the Esterházy treasury’s lidded goblet, 58 cm high, decorated with mother-of-pearl plaques, made by Urban Wolff, an outstanding master of Nuremberg goldsmithing. The restoration of this 446-part assembled goblet, completed in 2001, presented major challenges: the extent of the damage (the chased upper body flattened, serious losses in the mother-of-pearl covering), its condition, and the use of diverse materials and numerous techniques in its construction (mother-of-pearl plaques mounted on a double wall and cast inlays; a foot only 1.2 mm thick, etc.).
In 2002, from the Esterházy treasury, he conserved a nineteenth-century alabaster clock with copper inlays, and in 2008–2009, a so-called ‘rolling clock’ (gurulós óra), rare even in its mechanism and operation. As is known, during the Second World War the Esterházy palace on Tárnok Street in Buda suffered a direct hit, and the already severely damaged objects of the Esterházy treasury stored in the cellar deteriorated further over the following roughly four years, while they lay buried under and among the palace’s debris, exposed to the elements, including damage from frozen and waterlogged ground. As a result, the clock’s wooden base was beyond salvage. Reconstruction was possible only by analogy. The analogy for the restoration was found by Varga in the Museum für Franken’s holdings, Staatliches Museum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte in Würzburg: a rolling clock made in Strasbourg in 1680 by Isaak III Habrecht. On this basis, he produced the missing parts of the Esterházy clock (stand; adjustable screw element in silver).
Two of Péter Varga’s outstanding object copies are also linked to the Esterházy treasury. Their creation offered him the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of seventeenth-century workshop practice, and the humble mastery and assured, generous handling of the technical and material knowledge required, from producing and reproducing the specific seventeenth-century tools used in the making of the objects, through every single working process and technical procedure employed in the original. One of these objects is perhaps the treasury’s most famous, most frequently reproduced, and most iconic piece, closely tied to the history of the Esterházy family: the ceremonial dish made by the Augsburg goldsmith Philip Jacob Drentwett in commemoration of the Esterházy heroes who fell at the Battle of Vezekény. The making of the copy was commissioned by Princess Melinda Ottrubay, widow of Prince Pál Esterházy, who visited Hungary in 1998 and also the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. After examining the object and studying its material and making-technique, Varga threw himself into the work with passion; over two years of copying it demanded all his free time. The oval object (110 × 98 cm in diameter) was made using original techniques, in copper rather than the original silver, with the same diameter and thickness, and then silvered and gilded. The splendid masterpiece, which won the recognition of the princely family, is now on display as the property of the Esterházy Privatstiftung at the exhibition of Esterházy Castle in Forchtenstein (Esterházy Schatzkammer, Burg Forchtenstein, Austria).
A special moment in the afterlife of the work offers insight into the story of a piece of contemporary goldsmithing: Péter Varga’s humble making of the dish copy using seventeenth-century materials and techniques inspired the goldsmith József Kótai, who – unbeknown to Varga – modelled his friend and fellow practitioner, kneeling with the completed dish, the so-called Vezekényi dish, in his hands, before St Eligius, the patron saint of goldsmiths, presenting the masterpiece with humility, offering it to the saint-bishop, and giving thanks to God for the spiritual, emotional and physical strength that enabled him to complete the copy. Kótai first presented this small sculpture depicting Varga in 2000 at the Millennial Contemporary Goldsmithing Exhibition held at the Vigadó Gallery in Budapest.
The other outstanding object copy – a copy of the Esterházy treasury’s ‘Miners’ Goblet’ – was completed in 2001, after a year of work, for the Bochum Mining Museum, Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum [DBM]. The goblet was presented as a gift to Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary, in commemoration of his visit to Selmecbánya on 27 June 1650. According to current research, the masterpiece was most probably made in Selmecbánya in 1650 (the year is indicated by the chronosticon visible on the object). In producing the copy, Varga combined the historical goldsmithing techniques used in the original with galvanic techniques.
Alongside commissions for pieces from the Esterházy treasury and objects in the Museum of Applied Arts, he received numerous requests from Hungarian public and ecclesiastical collections – from national museums to small parishes – to conserve outstanding pieces, including those of the Hungarian National Museum and the National Széchényi Library. Among the defining works of his practice are, for example, the Coronation Oath Cross conserved for the Treasury of Esztergom Basilica (gold; thirteenth century; Hungary); the rock-crystal casket (fifteenth century; the Low Countries or Northern Italy); and László Zeleméry’s footed cross (fire-gilded silver; 1586; Hungary?); for the Church of Our Lady in Buda Castle (Matthias Church), an eighteenth-century sanctuary lamp (silver; eighteenth century; Hungary), an altar crucifix (silver; eighteenth century; Augsburg), and a pair of candlesticks (silver; eighteenth century; Augsburg); for the Archdiocese of Veszprém, a crosier (fire-gilded silver; eighteenth century); and for the Queen Gizella Museum in Veszprém, a chalice (fire-gilded silver; fifteenth century; Hungary).
A major milestone in his career came in 1978, when, at the invitation of the art historian Éva Kovács – head of the Technical Subcommittee of the Holy Crown Committee – he took part in examining the Holy Crown (returned to Hungary from the United States), alongside Professors Gyula László and György Györffy, the archaeologist–art historian Zsuzsa Lovag, the silversmith conservator-restorers Joachim Szvetnik and Jenő Rácz, and his inviter. Between 1980 and 1998, as a member of the Technical Subcommittee, he continued to provide expert oversight and conservation supervision of the Holy Crown; since 2007, he has continued this work as a member of the Holy Crown Committee’s Scientific Expert Commission.
A similarly outstanding commission was the reinforcement of the Holy Right hand relic with gold wire, requested of him in 1999 by Géza Szabó, canon of Szent István Bazilika (St Stephen’s Basilica) and then guardian of the Holy Right. The removal of the Holy Right and the conservation work took place in the presence of Cardinal László Paskai, Archbishop of Esztergom (and later Esztergom–Budapest); Attila Farkas, episcopal counsellor and art historian; Professor János Szentágothai, then President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Éva Kovács, art historian; Marianna Isa, textile conservator-restorer; and Sándor Kis, technical staff member.
In 2005, he was honoured to conserve one of Hungary’s most important national treasures: the reliquary bust of St Ladislaus (Szent László-herma), perhaps the country’s third most important medieval champlevé enamel goldsmith’s work and relic. The conservation took four months. In 2006, at the request of Archabbot Asztrik Várszegi of Pannonhalma, he designed and made a new reliquary for the skull relic of King Stephen. The double-cross reliquary in Pannonhalma Archabbey is among the principal works of his goldsmithing oeuvre.
In 2012, he received a commission to restore the reliquary housing for the skull relic of St Ladislaus and to undertake a conservator’s examination of the Mátyás-kálvária (Matthias Calvary) held in the Esztergom Basilica Treasury, preparing an expert report.
After forty years of service, he left the Museum of Applied Arts in 2012. Until his retirement in 2013, he worked as a colleague of the National Trust of Historic Monuments and, thereafter, of its legal successor, the Forster Gyula National Centre for Cultural Heritage Management, where he conserved, assessed, cared for, and supervised the metalwork objects of the Esterházy Palace at Fertőd–Eszterháza. In 2013, he became a cultural expert; in 2014, he served as an expert supervisor for the metal conservation work at the Várbazár (Castle Bazaar).
A summary of his career and artistic stance is presented in the ars poetica delivered at his induction speech to the Hungarian Academy of Arts: “Humility is not a virtue, but the ground from which everything else grows.”
[2017]