[paper:] Noble and Royal Heraldic Display in the Great Palace of the Hunedoara Castle (Radu Lupescu)

Detail of the Entrance to the spiral staircase tower of the Hunedoara Castle representing the
extended coat of arms of John Hunyadi.

The castle of Hunedoara houses the most complex heraldic programmes among the medieval residences of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom consisting of almost seventy coat of arms. Twenty-eight of them decorates the Great Palace of the castle, a construction started to be built by John Hunyadi and finished by his son, King Matthias Corvinus. This is the reason why two generation of heraldic decoration are displayed in the interior spaces and on the facade of the building. These arms reflects how John Hunyadi stepped forward on the hierarchical structure of the kingdom in the mid fifteenth century, and offers clues to his relationship with other influential nobleman and even to a possible political connection with France. The second generation of the arms are related to Matthias Corvinus who involved heraldry at great extent in the royal display. These arms refers to the members of the royal court at a given moment of his career. Furthermore, the presence of the two heraldic programmes in the same building gives the possibility to compare the heraldic display of a nobleman and a king and help us to understand how a particular building of the castle evolved from architecture point of view and which were the parts of a complex building suitable for heraldic decorations.

Radu Lupescu graduated from the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in 1996. He has got his PhD degree in 2007 in history of art. His major field of interest covers medieval architecture (art and archeology), especially the secular architecture of the 15th century, and the history of the Corvinus dynasty. He is teaching at the Sapientia University of Cluj-Napoca, and is the head of the European Studies Department.

The paper will be given at the international workshop: Heraldry in Medieval and Early Modern State-Rooms: Towards a Typology of Heraldic Programmes in Spaces of Self-Representation – Münster, Germany, 16-18 March 2016