Silver Crescent for Erzsabet Csesetvei
- sdoner2
- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
I took a short break from scribing to work on some things around our house. Specifically, I wanted to redo my art room. I painted my room, rearranged the furniture a bit, and made it a place of peace and inspiration.
Once I had my room where I could work again, I asked for new scribal assignments. Never to disappoint, our wonderful Tyger Signet gave me an option of three different types of scrolls. I chose Hungarian because it is an area I have not explored yet.
Having never been exposed to Hungarian art before, I dove in and began researching for an exemplar. This turned into a deeper dive than I had expected.
King Matthias Hunyadi of Hungary (Corvina) ruled between 1458 and 1490. In addition to his renowned military career and reform of the kingdom's political and economic structures, King Matthias patronized art and science. He promoted individuals for their abilities instead of their social status.
King Matthias had connections with Italy on many fronts. Matthias was aligned politically with the papacy and the Italian states concerning the Turkish wars. There was a history of Hungarian kings being granted the right to distribute ecclesiastical dignitaries. Matthias' second marriage to Beatrice of Aragon, princess of Naples, further cemented his connections with the Italian state. All these connections strongly influenced Matthias' interest in Italian art and the humanistic movement.
During Matthias' reign, Hungary became the first land outside Italy to promote and embrace the Renaissance. (Waldman)(Kubinyi). According to Joseph Connors in his forward to acts of a conference held at Villa i Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in Florence, on 6–8 June 2007:
Latinate humanism of the sort that had been developing in the papal court at Rome and in the Florentine chancery was transplanted to Hungary, the first country outside the Italian peninsula (and the Venetian possessions of Dalmatia) to receive and nurture the Italian Renaissance. (Farbaky)
At the time of his death, it is estimated that there were between 2000 and 2500 codices in Matthias' library. According to Katalin Barlai and Agnes Boronkai "with regards to size and topical wealth, it was surpassed only by the Vatican Library." (Barlai & Boronkai) The library consisted of about three thousand codices (books) which housed four to five thousand works. Following the Turkish conquest of Hungary that occurred after Matthias' death, the codices were moved to Istanbul. Today, there are about 220 corvinas that are housed in libraries across Europe and the United States. Corvina. "The Project." (Corvina)
For over a century and a half, the goal of the Corvina Project has been to collect the corvinas from around the world. The National Széchenyi Library has uploaded 93 of the codices on the Corvina website which is located at: https://corvina.hu/en/front/ I found this the best place to continue my research as all of the codices are located in one place. This website also has one of the most fascinating and educational, interactive 3-D walkthroughs of an exhibition: https://exhibitioncorvina2018.oszk.hu/.
So, why is all of this history important, and why did it make my research to find an exemplar more challenging? Because Matthias was devoted to the humanistic movement and, in particular, Italian art, it took time to review the codices in the virtual Bibliotheca to find a piece that had been created in Hungary.
This was important to me because the recipient's persona is Hungarian, and I wanted to recreate an authentic Hungarian piece. I finally settled on a page from Psalterium Davidis which was made between 1479 and 1481:
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