Hungarian National Gallery

This guide to the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest follows Tivadar Kosztka, a pharmacist's assistant who heard a voice in 1880 telling him he was destined to become the greatest painter in the world. It traces the decades he spent quietly saving money before picking up a brush in his forties, taking the name Csontváry, and painting enormous, blazing landscapes of ruins in Sicily and cedars in Lebanon that Budapest simply shrugged off. He refused every offer to sell, and by 1919 he had died alone, certain of his own genius and believed by almost no one. Stand in front of his blazing ruins of the Greek theatre at Taormina.