The volume plays tribute to nearly seven hundred years of Hungarian painting. It opens with codeces and altarpieces, manp of unknown provenance, so that our knowledge of their makers is scarce - a name on the fornier predella of the E11tar of Garamszentbenedek, or the initials MS on a panel in the Christian Museum of Esztergom. Still, even in the 14th to the 16th centuries, they can tell us much about themselves, first and foremost, that Gothic and Renaissance painting in Hungary, of which very little remains to us from times past, formed a harmonious unity with European art, playing a role in its development. The works to follow, whose makers are easier to identify, often prove to have been made by artists from abroad or, if their maker was of Hungarian origin - Adám Mányoki and Jakab Bogdány among them - it often happened that they would leave Hungary to work in another country.