Facsimile of Budapest Concordantiae caritatis published

Death of the Virgin from the Budapest Concordantiae caritatis

As reported by the miniaturaitaliana.com blog, the facsimile edition of the Budapest Concordantiae caritatis (1413, Budapest, Central Library of the Ordo Scholarum Piarum, CX 2) has been published by Schöck Art Print. It is an exclusive, leather-bound limited edition facsimile edition.

As the publisher states: The Budapest Concordantiae caritatis is the most richly illustrated medieval manuscript in Hungary. The work contained in it is that of a fourteenth-century author, Ulrich von Lilienfeld, who between 1345-1351 was the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Lilienfeld, Lower Austria. Concordantiae caritatis is a typological manuscript. Only eight copies of the Concordantiae caritatis known today contain illustrations and of these few the Budapest manuscript is worthy of a high position due to the high quality and completeness of its cycle of illustrations. As the colophon betrays, the text was written in 1413 by the Viennese burgher Stephanus Lang, in his own home. Seven artists, visibly in contact with each other but of varying education, participated in the illustration of the Budapest Concordantiae caritatis. Of them the most talented one can be linked with the circle of the Master of the Sankt Lambrecht Votive Picture, a group whose style became dominant in Viennese panel painting in the first third of the fifteenth century.

The text above was written by Anna Boreczky (National Széchényi Library), whose doctoral dissertation was dedicated to this hitherto little studied manuscript, and who edited the commentary volume to the facsimile. It is to be hoped that a more simple edition of the manuscript and the commentary volume will make this little-known treasury much more widely known. The facsimile edition - along with the edition of the Budapest Apollonius pictus, also edited by Boreczky - was presented today at the Hungarian Academy in Rome.

You can find some information (in Hungarian) about the manuscript on the website of the Piarist Order. You can also read the abstract of Boreczky's dissertation here.