Slideshow: Treasures from Budapest

Before they arrived in London, these masterpieces from Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts had been largely unseen beyond the former Iron Curtain since 1939. The Museum’s collection recounts 500 years of evolving tradition, enlivened by quirks of local flavour, the personal taste of leading collectors, and international-Hungarian cross currents that illuminate the unity of European culture before 1939. Yet this exhibition at the Royal Academy also reflects that Hungary – fought over between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and late to embrace Christianity – has a history unlike that of any other European nation.

Read Jackie Wullschlager’s review of Treasures from Budapest

‘Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, to December 12

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Treasures from Budapest

'Portrait of Elek Petrovics and Simon Meller' (1910), by Jozsef Rippl-Ronai

'Water-carrier' (c.1808-12), by Goya

'Studies for the Heads of Two Soldiers in the Battle of Anghiari' (c.1504-05), by Leonardo da Vinci

'Portrait of a Man' (1652-54), by Frans Hals

'Married Couple' (c.1620), by Van Dyck

St Andrew altarpiece (1512), by a Hungarian master

'Pilgrimage to the Cedars of Lebanon' (1907), by Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka

Esterhazy Madonna (c.1507-08), by Raphael

'St Mary Magdalene' (c.1580), by El Greco

'Saskia van Uylenburgh Sitting by a Window' (1635-38), by Rembrandt

'Still Life with Fruit, Parrots and White Cockatoo' (c.1710s), by Jakob Bogdany