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Four exhibitions marking Hungary's Renaissance Year 2008 - 550 years since King Matthias Corvinus, Hungary's "Renaissance King" was crowned - and opening in March are expected to draw many festival-goers.
The National Széchényi Library is showing Renaissance manuscripts as part of an exhibition entitled Star in the Shadow of the Raven - János Vitéz and the Beginnings of Humanism in Hungary. Among the highlights of the exhibition are letters written by János Vitéz, who tutored Matthias and became the Archbishop of Esztergom, the first printed version of the Cronica Hungarorum and the richly decorated breviary of Domonkos Kálmáncsehi, Provost of Székesfehérvár. In addition to objects from its own collection, the National Széchényi Library has borrowed from the German State Library in Munich, the St. Peter Library in Salzburg, the Austrian National Library, the Vatican Library, the Eötvös Loránd University Library and the Hungarian National Gallery.
Budapest's Museum of Applied Arts will open an exhibition of 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).
The Budapest History Museum is celebrating Renaissance Year 2008 with an exhibition of 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. The exhibition, entitled Matthias the King - Tradition and Renaissance in the King's Court 1458-1490, opens March 19.
At the end of March, the Hungarian National Gallery will open an exhibition picking up where the Budapest History Museum's leaves off - 1490 - to examine the Jagiellon Dynasty.
Author: Eszter Götz
