The Matthias Fountain, located in the court of the Buda Castle, is Budapest’s most beautiful and most popular water sculpture. Index shares an interesting bit of history of the creation of Alajos Hauszmann and Alajos Stróbl, depicting King Matthias Corvinus in the midst of hunting.
There are a lot of interesting stories regarding this sculpture grouping, such as:
- The hound in the middle was destroyed in 1945 and, although it was restored after the war, it is a much poorer quality work than the other two dogs are.
Restoring the dogs’ leashes after the war was simply ‘forgotten’.
- One of the creators, Stróbl, got so wound up in the glorious days that one pleasant summer evening he recreated Matthias’ boar hunting with his students in his garden. To tell the truth, they only re-enacted the ‘final scene’, where they roasted the ‘boar’. It wasn’t actually a boar, it was a pig bought at the butcher’s.
A new exhibition opens in Szentendre, called Ezüstkor (Silver Age) at the Barcsay Museum, presenting Szentendre from 1867 until 1921. This is the period when the other creator, Hauszmann, lived there, residing at the Annavölgy estate near Szentendre for 32 years.
While he lived in Szentendre, he was exerting his rights of hunting at the forests nearby, giving the proud flesh to the city’s poor.
The stag’s antlers were modelled after one of the prey’s, though it was not one of Hauszmann’s catches.
The stag was confiscated from a poacher who shot the animal near Szentendre, this is how Hauszmann got his hands on it, who later gave it to Stróbl. Finally, it ended up in bronze at the Buda Castle, and today thousands are amazed by it on a daily basis.
Source: index.hu
