“Matthias is dead—now books will be cheap in Europe!” So Lorenzo the Magnificent is said to have exclaimed on hearing of the passing of the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, in 1490. Matthias was the man behind the famous Corvina Library.

renaissance kings and their libraries

Matthias, who became King of Hungary aged 15 in 1458, can fairly be said to have led the way in exporting Renaissance art and humanism outside Italy. His erudition linked him closely with Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence. In fact, the two exchanged letters about their progress in forming their libraries. The Corvina Library, or Bibliotheca Corviniana, belonging to Matthias, was the first of its kind north of the Alps. Based on Italian models such as the library of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino or of Ferdinand of Aragon in Naples.

the corvina library in hungary

The Corvina Library grew to contain around 2,000 precious volumes. These were mainly works by ancient authors and Church fathers. Most of them were in Latin; some were in Greek. Only the Vatican Library could surpass it in scope and extent. King Matthias is known to have lavished a fortune on the project, either acquiring existing manuscripts and incunabula or having exquisitely illuminated copies made. By paying so well, Matthias turned books into valuable commodities, and Lorenzo the Magnificent (who was putting together a similar library in Florence), may well have felt the pinch.

the books on display

A superb small exhibition on Matthias’s library (“The Corvina Library and the Buda Workshop”) went on show at the National Széchényi Library in Budapest a few years ago. It featured many items sourced from collections within Hungary as well as plenty from further afield. This is natural enough, since the Buda shelves were emptied after the Ottoman conquest of 1541. It was a rare chance to see some of the surviving tomes.

where did king matthias get his books?

Matthias acquired his books from a number of sources. Many of them were purchased from Italy. Others he had copied, and he set up a workshop for the purpose at Buda, under the direction of Italian illuminators. Matthias’ bride, Ferdinand of Aragon’s daughter Beatrice, also brought volumes with her from Naples. Her coat of arms appears on a number of codices. From the 1480s, Matthias began to give his collection matching leather and velvet bindings, with elaborately worked clasps. He also appointed a librarian, Ugo Taddeo from Parma, to be in charge of acquiring new volumes and commissioning copies.

where was the corvina library kept?

Our best contemporary source for what the Corvina Library may have looked like is a four-part panegyric by the humanist poet Naldo Naldi. He tells of a vaulted room, tucked away in a secluded part of the palace in Buda, with coloured glass in the windows, incunabula and codices in inlaid shelves around the walls, their richly gilded bindings protected from dust by lozenge-patterned curtains. Between the windows stood a couch draped in cloth-of-gold, upon which the king would sprawl at his ease, a supreme monarch among the Muses. Other seating was provided by three-legged stools upholstered in cloth-of-gold studded with precious stones (ouch!).

two important copyists

The artistic style adopted by the copyists in the Corvina Library’s Buda workshop was heterogeneous, although broadly based on Italian models. Two of the leading hands were Francesco Rosselli from Florence and Francesco da Castello from Milan. The latter is known also to have been at work in Piacenza and for the Bishop of Lodi. The styles of these two men were generally regarded as the ones to follow. However, many of the illuminators at work in Buda were Flemish or German and the result is an interesting mix. The missal of a functionary at Matthias’ court, one Domonkos Kálmáncsehi, for example (1481, on loan from the Pierpont Morgan Library), contains only a single page illuminated by Francesco da Castello. The rest is by artists from Central Europe.

the cassianus codex

Another work thought to be by Francesco da Castello is the codex of Johannes Cassianus, concerning the rules of coenobite monks. Made in Buda, for the Corvina Library (although now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), it has given its name to the “Cassianus” group of codices, all illuminated in roughly the same style, the border designs of acanthus fronds and grottesche appearing against red and blue backgrounds. The Cassianus codex was completed in the reign of Vladislas II, who succeeded Matthias after his death in 1490.

the part played by queen beatrice

One of the volumes that presumably came to Buda with Matthias’s bride, Queen Beatrice, is a manuscript copy of Quintus Curtius Rufus’ Alexander the Great. It was made in Naples in the 1470s and has a handwritten note on the flyleaf, perhaps written by Beatrice herself: “In the year of our Lord 1491, on the Sunday after Epiphany, I arrived here at Eger and on the third day also arrived the glorious King Vladislas who had been crowned in 1490 on the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Cross.” Beatrice managed to cling onto her position as Queen of Hungary by marrying Vladislas later that same year. But she gave him no children and so he asked Pope Alexander VI (the notorious Rodrigo Borgia) declare the union null and void. She returned to Naples—but whether she took any of her books back with her, I cannot say.

books that were stranded by matthias’s death

Some of the books intended for the Corvina Library remained unfinished at Matthias’s death. These have survived because they never came to Buda, and so they did not suffer the fate of those that were caught up in the Ottoman conquest. Over a hundred books were in preparation. Many of them were being worked on in Florence by artists directly employed by King Matthias. An example is the exquisite Bible, with illuminations by Attavante and the brothers Gherardo and Monte di Giovanni, which is today preserved in the Biblioteca Laurenziana.

what happened to the library next?

The Corvina Library survived Matthias’s death intact by only half a century. In 1541, the Ottomans took Buda and most of its treasures were scattered and pillaged. However, the Turkish sultans Abdülaziz and Sultan Abdülhamid returned some volumes to Hungary in the 19th century. One of them, Caesar’s Gallic Wars (made in Florence in 1460–70), had its original binding replaced by an Ottoman one with crescent moons. Another, St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (made in Rome in the 1460s), preserves its 15th-century crimson velvet cover, with a gilt silver clasp decorated with the enamelled coat of arms of Matthias’s successor Vladislas, supported by twin dolphins.

The surviving books of the Corvina Library provide a rare glimpse into a world of luxury and learning.

by Annabel Barber, author of Blue Guide Budapest.