Gábor Almási

In the fifteenth century, the royal court of Hungary was among the first to adopt the artistic and literary forms of the new Renaissance culture of Italy. The mobility between Italy and Hungary, the arrival of merchants, artists, scholars, and the return of students played a principal role in this process.
Although these people have always been in the centre of Renaissance studies in Hungary, not everyone has received due attention. It is probably because of his late canonisation that Aurelio Lippo Brandolini (1454–1497) has avoided the attention of most scholars.

In this project, I argue that this half blind rhetorician, who wrote his most important books in Buda, was one of the most remarkable Italian visitors of the fifteenth century. This is most obviously proven by his Socratic dialogue between King Matthias Corvinus, his son John Corvinus, and a Florentine merchant of Buda. The book is a systematic comparison of republics and kingdoms, the very first of its kind. In it, Brandolini raises perennial questions about autocracy, republicanism, empires, ideology, rhetoric, commerce, and the possible ways to make individuals and societies better.