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8. Matthias’ Residences

Work on a Late Gothic reconstruction of the royal palace at the south end of Castle Hill in Buda was started by Matthias. He did not have the palace extended. In the first renaissance phase in the mid-1470s, an Italian workshop under Chimenti Camicia, the Florentine inlay artist-turned-architect, transformed the internal spaces of the existing building with gilded wooden ceilings, new windows and coloured Majolica tile floors. The second phase, the second half of the 1480s, gave rise to hanging gardens and the second floor of the west palace range over the still-extant cellar, the Cisterna Regia. The second palace courtyard was surrounded by arcades on the two upper stories. A start was made on the Late Gothic conversion of the two-storey palace chapel and unfinished palace of Matthias on old foundations on the Danube side of Sigismund Court.

Matthias also inherited the palace at the foot of the hill in Visegrád, and rebuilt it in the Late Gothic style between the mid-1470s and mid-1480s. The principal additions were the oriel, decorated with coats of arms, on the west range (starting 1476) and the north-east palace, whose quadrangular internal courtyard was surrounded by arcades. A renaissance organ gallery was added to the chapel, and some of the chapel furnishings were also made in the new style. Decorative fountains also appeared in the palace: the so called “wall fountain with lion figures” (1483) is in the Late Gothic style, but Italian artists were responsible for the Hercules Fountain in the courtyard of the north-east palace and the Fountain of the Muses, which survives almost solely in descriptions.

Matthias also spent time in Olomouc (Olmütz) and Wrocław (Breslau), but erected no buildings there. In the last period of his life, after 1485, he spent more time in Vienna than Buda, almost certainly in the Burg, the residence of the Austrian princes. The sources tell of the construction of renaissance hanging gardens here, too.