Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/42

28 molto belle, says Vasari). One was a portrait of Matthias, and the other the Lord's Supper.

It was probably the famous Caradosso who made the masterpiece of Renaissance goldsmith's work, the Calvary at Esztergom, for the king, which was afterwards given to the Primate Bakócz by the king's son, John Corvinus.

The most talented Italian artist at the Court of Matthias was the young Benedetto da Majano, afterwards the architect of the splendid palace belonging to the Strozzi family.

Matthias would not have been a typical Renaissance ruler had he not been passionately fond of fine vellum manuscripts, adorned with miniatures. He and the Italian princes were rivals in book-collecting, and as he could easily afford it, he used to spend as much as 30,000 golden florins annually on his library, which must have cost, in our money, some hundreds of thousands of pounds. His agents wandered as far as the Levant in order to procure interesting Greek manuscripts. The most eminent Floren­tine masters worked for his library, and he paid Attavantes for a single manuscript the price usually given for a masterpiece of painting. The miniatures on the parch­ments of Attavantes combine the fresh beauty of the early Renaissance with the most refined Greek taste.

In that age, love of art went hand in hand with admira­tion of antiquity. Italian potentates were all eager collectors of antique treasures. People did not always understand the Greeks and Romans, but they always venerated them. Matthias began collecting ancient relics, sarcophagi, tablets, bronze casts of coins, and both he and his favourite writers and artists speak of the Romans with the greatest reverence. "The King," writes a well-known Italian humanist, "reads even late at