Medici brings not only art, but experience Not, as you might think, a post-9/11 airport, but Budapest Museum of Fine Arts transformed into a fortress worthy of Renaissance Florence to house some of the era’s greatest art.
The Medici exhibition is one of the numerous attractions of Hungary’s 2008 “Renaissance Year”. Until 18 May, visitors have the chance to admire famous works of art by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Santi Santucci and many other old masters of the 15th and 16th centuries. The organisers trawled cities like Florence and Pisa for the exhibition’s roughly 200 pieces.
The Medici family
The exhibition The Splendour of the Medici: Art and Life in Renaissance Florence, aims to illustrate the life and influence of the wealthy Florentine family and their contemporaries.
The Medici family exercised a decisive influence on the development of Florence as the source of the Renaissance. The family, which became rich through trading in textiles, held high administrative offices from the 15th century, produced popes and through dynastic marriages among the nobility of Europe, gradually attained an unrivalled status in their native Italy. They acted as patrons to up-and-coming young artists like Donatello and shaped the aesthetic picture of the Italian Renaissance.
A walk through Florence
The first room visitors enter after passing through security contains several wall panels with a detailed chronology of the city of Florence. It includes huge books, painstakingly illuminated and adorned, and elaborate tapestries made by Florentine artisans in the 16th century. There are also coins the Medicis used in their their merchant banking activities 500 years ago. And finally, there are the original works by world-famous Renaissance artists: Fra Angelico’s Madonna della Benedizione (Mother and Child), Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur and Frans Pourbus’s portrait of Maria de Medici, in her capacity as Queen of France. Exhibits which come directly from the life of the family are the marriage certificate of Francesco de Medici and Johanna von Österreich (1565), a sonnet by Lorenzo de Medici (from around 1471), parts of the suit of armour of Cosimo I and a ceremonial velvet dress with a long train once worn by Cosimo’s wife, Eleonora.
In addition to showing off the works of illustrious artists, the curators also wish to give visitors a sense of what daily life was like more than 500 years ago at the time when the Hungarian monarch Matthias Corvinius was crowned. For this reason we can find a lovingly painted and adorned clothes chest, well-protected by security glass, next to Lippi’s religious images.
The exhibition allows visitors to experience the Renaissance as more than just a copy of classical styles of art and to immerse themselves in the era for a couple of hours.
Exhibition
Museum of Fine Arts, Hősök tere
Runs until 18 May
Daily except Mondays from 10am to 5:30pm
Tickets cost HUF 3,200 at the door or HUF www.mediciek.hu www.jegymester.hu
Tel.: 469-7100
The entrance and exit consist of glass doors with an elaborate security system. The light is dim, and every few seconds a shrill whistle sounds through the connecting rooms.
