It was through Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490), who became King of Hungary aged 15 in 1458, that Renaissance art and Humanism was first exported outside Italy. The King's erudition and interests linked him closely with Lorenzo il Magnifico in Florence, and they exchanged letters about their progress in forming their libraries. Many of the very beautiful volumes (often similar in size and decoration) that they commissioned in Florence from Renaissance artists and scholars have survived. By the end of his life Corvinus possessed one of the most important libraries then in existence—and, far richer than his Medici counterpart, he was able to put together an even more precious collection of manuscripts than the one then in Florence. Some of the manuscripts (including his Bible, exquisitely illuminated in Florence by Attavante and Gherardo and Monte di Giovanni) remained unfinished at his death so never reached Hungary, but are today preserved in the Medici Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.

In 1476 Corvinus married Beatrice, the highly educated daughter of Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples, and he had a splendid marble bust of her made by Francesco Laurana at the time of their engagement. She was only 16 or 17 years old and Laurana's sculpture is today one of the masterpieces in the Frick Museum in New York. The couple were then portrayed, probably by Giovanni Dalmata, in a double portrait (preserved in Budapest) in profile in low relief in white marble against a dark green background. Beatrice proved a worthy wife, sharing Matthias's passion for books and music and she herself was a patron of the arts. Also preserved in Budapest is the splendid brocaded velvet which once decorated the royal throne in Buda, known to have been made in Florence on a design by Antonio del Pollaiolo (and restored in 2013).

It was at the court of Matthias's predecessor King Sigismund that Filippo Scolari, known as Pippo Spano, had an important career as military leader but he was also a renowned Humanist. At that time the painter Masolino was called to Hungary to carry out frescoes for his funerary chapel, so the artist abandoned his work at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, leaving Masaccio to complete it. Pippo Spano was immortalised in Florence as one of the 'famous men' frescoed by Andrea del Castagno (now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, but sadly usually not on view).

During Matthias's time many Florentine merchants lived in Buda, including Bernardo Vespucci, brother of Amerigo. We know that in 1469 the Signoria sent two lions, symbols of Florence, to Corvinus, as a sign of homage.

A portrait of Matthias, with his characteristic long flowing locks, by an unknown Lombard painter copied from a famous portrait of him by Mantegna (now lost) has had an interesting history. When attributed to Boltraffio, it was purchased from a private Italian collection by the press baron Lord Rothermere, famous as an advocate of the revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty. In certain influential political circles in Hungary at the time Rothermere became so popular for the irredentist campaign in his popular newspapers that a proposal was made to him to become Hungarian head of state (or, if he preferred, to have his son thus enthroned). This clearly caused him considerable embarrassment and to avoid any misunderstanding he presented this portrait of Matthias to Miklós Horthy in 1930, on the tenth anniversary of the latter’s election as regent of the Hungarian state, and it was hung in the royal palace of Buda. It is now in the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest, but in store and so sadly not on view.

At the end of last year Italy dedicated its first exhibition to Matthias Corvinus, appropriately held in the library of San Marco, and curated by Péter Farbaky, director of the Budapest History Museum. Farbaky’s interest in Corvinus had already led to an international conference in Florence at Villa I Tatti in 2007, the papers of which where published in November 2011 by Harvard University.

(by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Florence.)

In March of this year, also in the Budapest History Museum, an exhibition will open of self-portaits of Hungarian artists from the Uffizi collection. The show will be reviewed on this blog.

‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They are lovely. Do you know which is the tombstone that is praised in Ruskin?’

[…] ‘I like Giotto,’ she replied. ‘It is so wonderful what they say about his tactile values.’

These famous words are uttered in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, by Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. When he published it, in 1908, the hopeful middle classes in Britain and the US all dreamed one day of going to Florence, to follow in Lucy’s footsteps. Many would have recognised, with a frisson of delight at their own erudition, that ‘tactile values’ is a quote from Bernard Berenson. And for decades this persisted. Everyone wanted to find out the answers to the same questions that bothered Lucy. And travel publishers brought out guide after guide to help them, earnestly describing fresco cycles, assisting the eager visitor to view with understanding what needed to be viewed and understood.

Today that mould has been broken. Tactile values can go hang. Not that human nature has changed; it cannot. Travellers still dream of going to Florence and they are still anxious to see and to experience. They are as delighted as ever—as thrilled as Lucy was—to get a personalised guided tour and to tell everyone back home.

But not in Santa Croce. The Peruzzi Chapel doesn’t have the glamour it once had. Far better would be if the maitre d’ at Enoteca Pinchiorri, thrice Michelin starred, were to rush forward, usher you to an excellent table, whisk the menu from your hands and offer to concoct a personalised gastro tour, just for you.

So yes, it’s still all about wanting to emulate the heroes of our age and to be admired in our turn as members of some charmed inner circle. Lucy and her culture-hungry counterparts were aping the patrician Grand Tourists of the previous century, who had wanted art and sculpture. Lucy joined them, wanting art and sculpture too. But today our heroes have changed. They are no longer aristocrats and aesthetes with cabinets full of Tuscan bronzes or walls adorned by Renaissance artists with breathtaking brushwork. They are TV chefs with Mediterranean herb gardens and nifty knife work. When we go on holiday, we don't hang upon the words of Berenson. Few may need to know which was the tombstone admired by Ruskin. People are traversing Italy as much as ever, but with Plotkin, not Ruskin, as their mentor.

Food, after all, is universal. Everyone eats. And now too, unlike 50 years ago, the travelling, vacationing classes do their own cooking and housekeeping. Food is a levelling, absorbing subject. Suddenly, for the mass of travellers, Giotto’s pigments are not half so interesting as Maestro Giorgio’s condiments.

For the Blue Guide Italy Food Companion, a handy guide to help you negotiate any menu (and available in print or as a downloadable app), see here. Fred Plotkin's Italy for the Gourmet Traveler is published by Kyle.

An important preservative as well as sweetener, honey was an indispensable ingredient in the Classical kitchen. Along with the bees of Mount Hymettus and Mount Ida in Greece, the wild bees of Mount Hybla in the province of Ragusa, Sicily, were the most celebrated source of honey in Antiquity. They and their produce became a literary byword for all things exceptionally sweet and good, eventually coming to represent poetry itself. Citing Theocritus (c. 300 bc), the founding father of the pastoral idyll, the American 19th-century nature writer John Burroughs expanded on the subject in his Locusts and Wild Honey: ‘Sicily has always been rich in bees.

The idylls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees, ‘flat-nosed bees’ as he calls them in the Seventh Idyll, and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world’s goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes Adonis are ‘honey-cakes’, and other tidbits made of ‘sweet honey’. In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.’ In his first Eclogue, Virgil described the ideal lullaby for old age to be the murmuring of Hybla bees. Ovid compared women’s hairstyles to their numberlessness. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with some sarcasm Cassius remarks that Mark Antony’s fine words ‘rob the Hybla bees and leave them honeyless’.

In one sonnet John Keats longs to sweeten his song by sipping the dew on ‘Hybla’s honied roses’ in the moonlight. Fanny Trollope, disappointed in business in the US, made euphemistic use of the honey’s proverbial qualities in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): ‘During nearly two years that I resided in Cincinnati, or its neighbourhood, I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his efforts to increase it; thus every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey of Hybla, vulgarly called money; neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit.’ That pursuit was possibly not far from the mind of James Leigh Hunt when he published a popular volume of Sicilian divertimenti simply entitled A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla in 1848. The actual thing can in fact still be purchased, in different varieties according to the flora of the season: the satra honey is derived from wild thyme; zagara honey from citrus flowers.

Extract from Blue Guide Sicily © Blue Guides, All Rights Reserved. For more Sicily posts, see here.

The Turkish Van is not a mode of transport. It is a domestic feline animal, otherwise known as the Van Cat from its home in the Van region of eastern Turkey. It is said that the cats first came to Europe from the Middle East, in the wake of returning crusaders, and thence, in the 20th century, made their way to the United States.

The cats are recognised by their long bushy tails and fluffy white coats, often with brown markings on the head and tail (the all-white ones are very beautiful but breeders complain that they are prone to deafness). Uniquely, their fur is resistant to water: the Van cat is an enthusiastic swimmer. Their other peculiarity, which makes them startling to look at, is their tendency to have eyes of odd colours: one blue, the other tawny.

Paola Pugsley’s guide to the Van region of Turkey is published in digital format as Blue Guide Eastern Turkey. For more Turkey posts, see here.