During the Middle Ages, the natural geographical zone of artistic connections was
limited to directly neighbouring regions and territories, and these contacts were
immediate and interactive in nature. Artistic contacts reaching far beyond the borders
of usual trade and cultural exchange zones can be characterized with adjectives such
as transregional or continental, rather than interregional. Whenever we face a phenomenon
ignoring the logic of the linear spread of styles, it is worth analyzing the tendency
of compensation of Europe's cultural map and the process of development of international
style phenomena on one hand, and on the other hand, the development of new forms of
cultural cooperation and of new social attitudes can be observed. A new line in the
research of Hungarian art in the first third of the 13th century focuses on artworks
showing a primary connection to faraway French gothic art centres. While analyzing
the new church of Pannonhalma, built ca. 1220, and the sepulchral monuments of Pilis
abbey (ca. 1230), the aim of this presentation is to find new viewpoints to the history
of unusual and exceptional faraway connections, to the questions of channels and mechanisms
of transregional cultural cooperation, to the special reasons and ways of long distance
cultural transport. The recent inspiration of French models can be analyzed from and
artistic geographical point of view as well, although its socio-historical connections
are also of interest. The traceable channels of this phenomenon are mostly well-documented
motivations of primarily political connections of ruling dynasties and their immediate
environment.