[Grem] Celebrating a Bond Between Hungary and the Medicis

[Elizabeth]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/arts/celebrating-a-bond-between-hungar
y-and-the-medicis.html?_r=0
 

Celebrating a Bond Between Hungary and the Medicis

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/11/07/arts/international/07inyt
-morris07-span/07inyt-morris07-span-articleLarge.jpg

Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence

The palace of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary,  in a volume dating
from around 1490.

By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS

Published: November 6, 2013

 

FLORENCE — Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary from 1458 to 1490, formed
an unusually close relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici, the head of the
Medici clan from 1469 until his death in 1492.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/11/07/arts/international/07inyt
-morris07-inline4/07inyt-morris07-inline4-popup.jpg

This special bond, which made Hungary one of the first states north of
the Alps to embrace Italian Renaissance art and thought, is the subject
of an enlightening exhibition, “Matthias Corvinus: Art and Humanism at
the Court of the Hungarian King,” at the Dominican monastery of San
Marco here.

The exhibition, displayed in the library, which was once one of
Florence’s most important intellectual meeting places, shows how both
Lorenzo and Matthias made conscious use of expensive art to legitimize
their positions.

The most imposing object is an intricate silk brocade throne hanging,
densely embroidered in gilded silver thread with classical motifs
including urns, eagles, cornucopias, garlands and Matthias’s coat of
arms. Designed by Antonio del Pollaiolo, this costly fabric — restored
for this exhibition — not only records the sophistication of Florence’s
workshops, but also the vast sums that Matthias was prepared to spend on
Florentine products to enhance his magnificence at home.

The show goes on to explore the various areas of cultural life in
Hungary that were influenced by the constant comings and goings between
Florence and Matthias’s peripatetic court.

Excavations of archaeological remains, some of them on show here, have
confirmed contemporary descriptions of the king’s efforts to transform
his palace in Buda into a Renaissance residence through architectural
additions, classical decorative elements in marble and bronze and the
display of ancient Roman finds. These projects were paralleled in
Florence itself, in the remodeling of the medieval Palazzo Vecchio in
the city’s central square.

Matthias’s marriage in 1476 to Beatrice of Aragon, the daughter of King
Ferdinand of Naples, brought another wave of Italian artists and
intellectuals to Hungary. Many of them were Florentines, including
Francesco Bandini, a close associate of the famous Florentine humanist
Marsilio Ficino, and the architect Chimenti Camicia. Some fine examples
of classically inspired sculpture survive from this time, among them a
beautiful portrait bust of Beatrice at the age of about 18 by Francesco
Laurana, an exceptional loan from the Frick Collection in New York.

Matthias’s most ambitious and expensive humanist project of all was the
amassing of a library of illuminated works to rival, even to surpass,
any in Italy — many dazzling examples of which are on show here. Almost
all of these were manufactured in Florence, giving long-term employment
to scores of scribes and illuminators. When the king died suddenly in
1490, work abruptly ceased on these commissions, as witnessed here by an
only partly illuminated volume of the never-to-be-completed,
three-volume “Matthias Corvinus Bible.” Some of the codices on show,
left unfinished in Florence, were completed at Medici expense and ended
up in their libraries.

LOOKING EAST Meanwhile, an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi revisits the
Russian avant-garde. In 1995 Italy was the scene of a groundbreaking
exhibition, “Paul Gauguin and the Russian Avant-garde,” at the Palazzo
dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Works by Gauguin, originally bought by the
pre-Soviet collectors of post-impressionism Mikhail and Ivan Morozov and
Sergei Shchukin, were shown with pieces by Russian artists influenced by
these imports.

“The Russian Avant-garde, Siberia and the East” at Palazzo Strozzi,
returns to this subject, but this time seeking to demonstrate that
Russian painting and sculpture of this period owed as much, if not more,
to the artists’ encounters with works from Central Asia, Siberia and a
wide range of Eastern countries.

The exhibition is arranged around themes, including “Exotic Sources:
>From Greece to Siam,” “The Far East,” and “Gestures and Rituals,” and it
contains works by, among others, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail
Larionov, who were featured in the 1995 Ferrara show, as well as
anonymous traditional Central Asian and Siberian pieces.

Dostoyevsky’s assertion that “a Russian is not only a European, but also
an Asian” is quoted in the catalog and this sense of duality is a
recurring theme. But the exhibition fails to convince that Russian
artists of the first three decades or so of the 20th century had a
greater knowledge or understanding of Eastern art than their Western
brothers and sisters. Indeed, also quoted in the catalog is a pertinent
observation by the art historian Dmitri Sarabianov: “Despite the fact
that Russian space had reached the borders of Japan and China,
Orientalist tendencies entered our art from the West in a very
roundabout way.”

While even the talented Natalia Goncharova in mystical mode may have
declared herself closer to the East than the West, her paintings on show
here manifest the palpable influence of Gauguin, Matisse and Cézanne,
and the Asian objets d’art in her “Still-life with a Chinese Print” and
“Still-life with Sculpture” are attractive decorative devices rather
than evidence of a deep affinity with the arts of the East.

Matthias Corvinus: Art and Humanism at the Court of the Hungarian
King.Museo di San Marco, Florence. Through Jan. 6.

 

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