recently beheaded) as well as mythological characters. The statues had a curious fate. Half a century later they were in Constantinople, among the ruins of the Byzantine Emperor's hippodrome, carried thither by the victorious Turks. And the statues, relics of Hungarian Renaissance times, stood there side by side with other interesting objects. Next to them was the famous brass serpent and the golden tripod, which the victorious Greeks erected at Delphi to commemorate the siege of Thebes. There too were the Egyptian obelisk of Theodosius the Great and the triumphal column of Constantine. All the nations whose victories had been celebrated by these monuments were then beneath the Turkish yoke.
A great hurricane of historical events had swept the wrecks of the golden age of Egypt, Greece, Byzantium and Hungary into one heap. Such is the irony of fate—relics reminding us of Thothmes III., of the conquerors of Salamis, of Theodosius the Great, and of Matthias Corvinus, stood on the site of the circus which the Turks used as a stable. The statues taken from the palace of the Hungarian King were destroyed in the sixteenth century; some of the other relics are still to be seen among the ruins of the Hippodrome.
Among the artists of the early Renaissance who worked for Matthias was Andrea del Verrocchio, the creator of the finest equestrian statue in the world—the Colleone statue in Venice. Later, the Prince of Milan, Lodovico il Moro, commissioned Verrocchio's great pupil, Leonardo da Vinci, to paint a Madonna for King Matthias, adding that "he is able to value a great picture as few can."
Filippino Lippi could not accept the King's invitation, but painted two pictures for him in Florence (due tavole
