Under the influence of Italian humanism and of his book-collector tutor János Vitéz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1443–1490), developed a passion for books and learning. Elected king of Hungary in 1458 at the age of 14, Matthias won great acclaim for his battles against the Ottoman Turks and his patronage of learning and science. He created the Bibliotheca Corviniana, in its day one of Europe’s finest libraries. After his death, and especially after the conquest of Buda by the Turks in 1541, the library was dispersed and much of the collection was destroyed, with the surviving volumes scattered all over Europe. This codex, originally in the Corvinus Library and now preserved in the Medicea Laurenziana Library in Florence, dates from the late 1480s. It contains works written in the mid-1470s by Domizio Calderini (1447–78), a courtier, scholar, humanist, and controversial literary commentator, who was born in the province of Verona and died in Rome. Included here are his commentaries on Juvenal’s <em>Satires</em>, Publius Papinius Statius’s <em>Silvae</em>, Ovid's <em>Letter of Sappho</em>, and works by the elegiac poet Sextus Propertius. The Bibliotheca Corviniana Collection was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2005.
<br>Codex; Illuminations; Juvenal; Memory of the World; Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.; Propertius, Sextus, circa 50 B.C.-15 A.D.; Statius, Publius Papinius, circa 45-circa 95
Calderino, Domizio, 1447-1478
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