Régi Kövek, Régi Könyvek A Budai Krónika Jankovich-Példánya és az Egyetemi Könyvtár régi kőgyűjteménye

Abstract

Abstract The provenance of several stone carvings thought to have belonged among the renaissance carved stones of King Matthias Corvinus' Buda palace is uncertain. A huge gable field with a coat of arms and a monumental inscribed tablet came to the collection of the Hungarian National Museum in 1874. Earlier, they adorned the old building of the University Library — the convent of the Franciscans of Pest — but it has not been clarified yet how they had got there. This time, sources have been found about their transfer into the National Museum. They were involved in an exchange: for the carved stones (some Roman ones as well in addition to the renaissance stones) that were extracted when the old library building was pulled down, the University Library received the second copy of Chronica Hungarorum (Buda, Andreas Hess, 1473), the first book printed in Hungary preserved in the National Széchényi Library. This copy of the Chronicle has permanently been in Hungary and eventually got into the National Museum and the Library together with the collection of Miklós Jankovich, the great art collector. It was part of a colligatum containing Caius Julius Caesar's De bello Gallico, which — to a superficial observer — might also have been taken for a product of the Hess printing office. From the colligatum (adorned with a late medieval Hungarian book cover) the Hess incunabulum was removed and given to the University Library together with another four old books printed in Hungary.