Portrait of Beatrice of Aragon, queen consort of Hungary Benedetto da Maiano (attributed to) Giovanni Dalmata (previous attribution)

The marble reliefs depicting King Matthias of Hungary (1443–1490) and his second wife, Beatrice of Aragon (1457–1508), the daughter of King Ferdinand I of Naples, are masterpieces of Italian quattrocento portraiture. Moreover, in Hungary they have great historical significance: King Matthias was one of the most successful monarchs among the Hungarian kings and also the first ruler in Europe north of the Alps who patronized Italian Renaissance art. The classicizing portraits, whose characteristic shape brilliantly combines the relief with the bust, have become an emblematic representation of the royal couple in Hungary. The reliefs may have originally been in the royal castle of Buda, however, their first written mention only dates back to 1571. In a letter on 20 August, Maximilian II (1527–1576), the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Hungary asked for the reliefs, then held in north-eastern Hungary in the possession of Gergely Bornemissza, bishop of Csanád and provost of Szepes (today Spiš, Slovakia), to be sent to him. Consequently, the portraits arrived in Vienna on 14 March 1572 and entered the imperial collection, later becoming part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s collection. In the first half of the 20th century, as a result of the Venice Agreement between Austria and Hungary in 1932, the two artworks re-entered into the ownership of the Hungarian state. The following year, the portraits were taken into the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Hungarian historiography rediscovered the portraits only in the middle of the 19th century. Since the sculptures came into the focus of art historical research, various attributions have been proposed, although none of them achieved general acceptance. Benedetto da Maiano, Francesco Laurana (d. before 1502), Gian Cristoforo Romano (ca. 1465 – 1512), and Giovanni Dalmata (ca. 1440 – ca. 1514) have all been suggested as possible creators of the reliefs, however Lombard or Milanese origin was also raised as a possibility. In his 1994 monograph on Giovanni Dalmata, Johannes Röll argued anew for the authorship of the Dalmatian sculptor who worked in Hungary, at the court of Matthias, from the early 1480s to 1490. However, the style of the two artworks could not entirely support this attribution. More recently, Paolo Parmiggiani identified the portraits of Matthias and Beatrice as the works of Benedetto da Maiano in an exhaustive paper. According to Parmiggiani, the reliefs generally dated to the period between 1480 and 1490 would have been made much earlier, around 1476 in Florence, on the occasion of the marriage of Matthias and Beatrice. Parmiggiani discovered many similarities in style and carving between these portraits and other sculptures by Benedetto da Maiano. He also argued that Benedetto da Maiano regularly worked for Beatrice's father, King Ferdinand I of Naples, through the intermediation of the Florentine banker and diplomat Filippo Strozzi (1428–1491). The technical examination of the reliefs carried out in 2015 also confirmed their Florentine origin. According to the analysis, the marble material shows the characteristics of Carrara marble. At the same time, the dark green inlay of the background, traditionally thought to be jasper, was revealed to be serpentinite, which was a popular stone known in Tuscany as “marmo verde di Prato” and commonly used in Florence for the exterior and interior decoration of churches.

Miriam Szőcs

Inscribed lower center: REGINA HVNGARIAE | BEATRIX DE ARAGONIA

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