Medieval stone carvings from the Castle of Borosjenő (Ineu, Arad County, Romania)

Weisz, Attila and Kovács, Zsolt (2022) Medieval stone carvings from the Castle of Borosjenő (Ineu, Arad County, Romania). ACTA HISTORIAE ARTIUM ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 63 (1). pp. 9-34. ISSN 0001-5830

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Abstract

The castle of Borosjenő (Ineu, Romania), which is largely Renaissance in form, also displays important ar- chitectural phases from before and after this period. During the on-site art historical research of 2016 and 2019 it was an especially important task removing numerous Romanesque, pre-1200 carvings in secondary use as building material. The (majority of) carvings we have identified most likely originated in the monastery of Dénesmonostora (Dienesmonostora), which once stood near Borosjenõ. Probably by the end of the fourteenth century, when it had disappeared from the written sources, and certainly by the sixteenth century, the monastery had been abandoned, and its remains have since disappeared. Proof of the high artistic value of these carvings was the capital depicting a siren, removed during the reconstruction of the castle in the 1870s. The owner of the castle at that time donated it to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, where today it is a part of the permanent collection. Some of the newly-founded capitals and other decorative architectural ele- ments have very rare analogies in the Hungarian Romanesque architecture, but show artistic connections with the Alsace region (e.g. Sainte foy church in Sélestat). Several other medieval fragments can be dated to a period later than the twelfth century. The paper contains also a catalogue of about thirty-eight carved stone-fragments.

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