Giovanni d’Aragona (1456‒1485) szerepe Mátyás király mecénásságában
Authors: Farbaky Péter 
Published: March 2022

King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458‒1490), son of the “Scourge of the Turks,” John Hunyadi, was a foremost patron of early Renaissance art. He was only fourteen years old in 1470 when he was elected king, and his patronage naturally took some time and maturity to develop, notably through his relations with the Neapolitan Aragon dynasty. In December 1476, he married Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon, who brought to Buda a love of books and music she had inherited from her grandfather, Alphonse of Aragon.

I studied the work of Beatrice’s brother John of Aragon (Giovanni d’Aragona), previously known mainly from Thomas Haffner’s monograph on his library (1997), from the viewpoint of his influence on Matthias’s art patronage. John was born in Naples on June 25, 1456, the third son of Ferdinand I of Aragon. His father, crowned king by Pope Pius II in 1458 following the death of Alphonse of Aragon, intended from the outset that he should pursue a church career. Ferdinand’s children, Alphonse (heir to the throne), Beatrice, and John were educated by outstanding humanist teachers, including Antonio Beccadelli (Il Panormita) and Pietro Ranzano. Through his father and the kingdom’s good relations with the papacy, John acquired many benefices, and when Pope Sixtus IV (1471‒1484) created him cardinal at the age of twenty-one, on December 10, 1477, he made a dazzling entrance to Rome. John was — together with Marco Barbo, Oliviero Carafa, and Francesco Gonzaga — one of the principal contemporary patrons of the College of Cardinals.

On April 19, 1479, Sixtus IV appointed John legatus a latere, to support Matthias’s planned crusade against the Ottomans. On August 31, he departed Rome with two eminent humanists, Raffaele Maffei (also known as Volaterranus), encyclopedist and scriptor apostolicus of the Roman Curia, and Felice Feliciano, collector of ancient Roman inscriptions. John made stops in Ferrara, and Milan, and entered Buda — according to Matthias’s historian Antonio Bonfini — with great pomp. During his eight months in Hungary, he accompanied Matthias and Beatrice to Visegrád, Tata, and the Carthusian monastery of Lövöld and probably exerted a significant influence on the royal couple, particularly in the collecting of books. Matthias appointed his brother-in-law archbishop of Esztergom, the highest clerical office in Hungary, with an annual income of thirty thousand ducats.

Leaving Hungary in July 1480, John returned to Rome via Venice and Florence, where, as reported by Ercole d’Este’s ambassador to Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici showed him the most valuable works of art in his palace, and he visited San Marco and its library and the nearby Medici sculpture garden.

In September 1483, Sixtus IV again appointed John legate, this time to Germany and Hungary. He took with him the Veronese physician Francesco Fontana and stayed in Buda and Esztergom between October 1483 and June 1484. The royal couple presented him with silver church vessels, a gold chalice, vestments, and a miter.

John’s patronage focused on book collecting and building. He spent six thousand ducats annually on the former. Among his acquisitions were contemporary architectural treatises by Leon Battista Alberti and Filarete, which he borrowed for copying from Lorenzo’s library. They were also featured in Matthias Corvinus’s library, perhaps reflecting John’s influence. Around 1480, during his stay in Buda (approximately 1478‒1480), the excellent miniaturist, Francesco Rosselli made the first few large-format luxury codices for Matthias and Beatrice. Both Queen Beatrice and John of Aragon played a part of this by bringing with them the Aragon family’s love of books, and perhaps also a few codices. The Paduan illuminator Gaspare da Padova (active 1466‒1517), who introduced the all’antica style to Neapolitan book painting, was employed in Rome by John as well as by Francesco Gonzaga, and John’s example encouraged Matthias and Beatrice commission all’antica codices. He may also have influenced the choice of subject matter: John collected only ancient and late classical manuscripts up to 1483 and mainly theological and scholastic books thereafter; Matthias’s collection followed a similar course in which theological and scholastic works proliferated after 1485. Anthony Hobson has detected a link between Queen Beatrice’s Psalterium and the Livius codex copied for John of Aragon: both were bound by Felice Feliciano, who came to Hungary with the Cardinal. Feliciano’s probable involvement with the Erlangen Bible (in the final period of his work, probably in Buda) may therefore be an important outcome of the art-patronage connections between John and the king of Hungary.

John further shared with Matthias a passion for building. He built palaces for himself in the monasteries of Montevergine and Montecassino, of which he was abbot, and made additions to the cathedral of Sant’Agata dei Goti and the villa La Conigliera in Naples. Antonio Bonfini, in his history of Hungary, highlights Matthias’s interest, which had a great impact on contemporaries; but only fragments of his monumental constructions survive.

We see another link between John and Matthias in the famous goldsmith of Milan, Cristoforo Foppa (Caradosso, c. 1452‒1526/1527). Caradosso set up his workshop in John’s palace in Rome, where he began but — because of his patron’s death in autumn 1485 — was unable to finish a famous silver salt cellar that he later tried to sell. John may also have prompted Matthias to invite Caradosso to spend several months in Buda, where he made silver tableware.

Further items in the metalware category are our patrons’ seal matrices. My research has uncovered two kinds of seal belonging to Giovanni d’Aragona. One, dating from 1473, is held in the archives of the Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino. It is a round seal with the arms of the House of Aragon at the centre. After being created cardinal in late 1477, he had two types of his seal. The first, simple contained only his coat of arm (MNL OL, DL 18166). The second elaborate seal matrix made in the early Renaissance style, of which seals survive in the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Fondo Veneto I 5752, 30 September 1479) and one or two documents in the Esztergom Primatial Archive (Cathedral Chapter Archive, Lad. 53., Fasc. 3., nr.16., 15 June 1484). At the centre of the mandorla-shaped field, sitting on a throne with balustered arm-rest and tympanum above, is the Virgin Mary (Madonna lactans type), with two supporting figures whose identification requires further research. The legend on the seal is fragmentary: (SIGILL?)VM ……….DON IOANNIS CARDINALIS (D’?) ARAGONIA; beneath it is the cardinal’s coat of arms in the form of a horse’s head (testa di cavallo) crowned with a hat. It may date from the time of Caradosso’s first presumed stay in Rome (1475‒1479), suggesting him as the maker of the matrix, a hypothesis for which as yet no further evidence is known to me. The seals of King Matthias have been thoroughly studied, and the form and use of each type have been almost fully established.

John of Aragon was buried in Rome, in his titular church, in the Dominican Basilica of Santa Sabina. Johannes Burckard described the funeral procession from the palace to the Aventine in his Liber notarum. Matthias died in 1490 in his new residence, the Vienna Burg, and his body was taken in grand procession to Buda and subsequently to the basilica of Fehérvár, the traditional place of burial of Hungarian kings. The careers of both men ended prematurely: John might have become pope, and Matthias Holy Roman emperor.

(The bulk of the research for this paper was made possible by my two-month Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts [CASVA] of the National Gallery of Art [Washington DC] in autumn 2019.) [fordította: Alan Campbell]