Thursday, February 26, 2015

Corvinian manuscripts digitised

The very exciting digitisation process at the Vatican Library is going ahead at full speed, and the Library has made available online two manuscripts from the famous Bibliotheca Corviniana, the library of King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490). The manuscripts are the following:


Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Urb. lat. 110

The Missal of Matthias Corvinus, 1488-1489

The manuscript was made for King Matthias in the Buda workshop. The coat of arms of Matthias and his wife Beatrice of Aragon can be found on several pages.
It is a richly illustrated volume, with stylistic connections to Lombardy.
See also the catalogue page with bibliographic references. 




















Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Missale fratrum minorum secundum consuetudinem Romanae curiae

This is a Franciscan Missal commissioned by King Matthias, and given to a Franciscan friar named Thomas (so technically, this is not a Corvinian manuscript, as it was not part of the Biblioteca Corviniana). The book was illuminated by an Austrian painter active in Vienna.




















With the two books above, the number of Corvinian manuscripts online now exceeds 100. On this occassion, I decided to move my checklist of digitised manuscripts over to this blog - you can reach it any time from the menu above. The version on my website is now obsolete - links have been checked and fixed on the version here in the blog. I also added links to two manuscripts digitised at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Museum of Fine Arts closes for three years

Photo of the Romanesque Hall at the Museum of Fine Art © MTI
The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest will be closed for the renovation of the building from 16 February 2015 until the end of 2017. During this period a highlight-selection from the Museum’s collection will be on view in the Hungarian National Gallery (in Buda Castle). The Museum will reopen in 2018 with brand new exhibitions and new spaces. The most important part of this renovation process will be the restortion of the so-called Romanesque Hall of the Museum, which had been closed since 1945. Since then, the space has been used as a storage space for the fantastic collection of plaster casts of medieval and renaissance sculpture, accumulated in the early years of the Museum's history. 


The Romanesque Hall at the time of the opening of the building (1906)


The plasters casts will be restored and put on display in a newly created museum space at the 19th century fortress of Komárom (see this article, with visualizations of the plans). Some other will be moved to the newly created National Museum Restoration and Storage Center, which is being developed on the site of a hospital, located behind the museum - see the plans in this article.


The state of the Romanesque Hall before the war


In addition, several other spaces of the museum will be restored, and new underground areas will be created for the storage of artworks and for a new space for large temporary exhibition. The entire heating and air-conditioning system of the museum will be redone, as well. This Hungarian language article in Népszabadság has more details. The renovation of the museum and the other developments mentioned above are all part of the controversial Liget Budapest project, which is aimed to create several new museum in City Park (read more on it). During the years of closure, the Museum of Fine Arts will continue to organize exhibitions in the Hungarian National Gallery, which was joined to it a few years ago. Highlights from the permanent collection will also be shown there.

See also this video about the Romanesque Hall from Szépművészeti Múzeum on Vimeo.