The Budapest History Museum is celebrating Renaissance Year 2008, which marks the 550th anniversary of Matthias Corvinus's coronation, with the exhibition Matthias the King - Tradition and Renaissance in the King's Court 1458-1490. It features more than 400 objects from Hungary as well as the Uffizi in Florence, the Vatican Library, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and collections in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany.
Budapest's Museum of Applied Arts is showing majolica from the period of King Matthias and his Jagiellon successors entitled The Dowry of Beatrice - The art of Italian Majolica and the Court of King Matthias Corvinus. The exhibition presents the origin of the glazed ceramics in 15th century Italy and revisits the craft's most important centres. Among the highlights of the exhibition are three of four surviving pieces of the Corvinus-service, bearing the coats of arms of King Matthias and his wife, Beatrice of Aragon. The pieces represent the peak of Italian majolica in the late 15th century and were the first big commission for the ceramics north of the Alps. They are on loan from the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (Berkeley).
