ABSTRACT
The beginnings of art historical periods and styles have always been a concern for the grand narratives of art history. For Imre Henszlmann, one of the founding fathers of Hungarian art history in the nineteenth century, the advent of Gothic art in the Kingdom of Hungary was closely connected with the year 1241, a landmark in the history of Saint Stephen’s realm. The Mongol invasion of that year represented both a historical and art historical disaster, many of the important monuments built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries being either destroyed or seriously damaged. Nonetheless, the invasion, and the rebuilding of destroyed monuments that followed, offered the perfect opportunity for identifying a renewal of Romanesque architecture with Gothic elements. The interest in finding beginnings and endings seems to echo other nineteenth-century debates, especially in France, regarding the emergence of Romanesque art around the year 1000. A particularly interesting case is the historiography of the Cistercian monastery in Kerz, Transylvania (Cârţa in present-day Romania). Because the building was refashioned with early Gothic elements after the Mongol invasion, scholars were able to connect a major historical date, the year 1241, with the Cistercian monks as heralds of Gothic architecture, and with the emergence of the Gothic style in medieval Transylvania.
