Janus Pannonius Múzeum Évkönyve 23 (1978) (Pécs, 1979)

Művészettörténet - Szabó Júlia: Néhány ikonográfiai előzmény Csontváry cédrus festményeihez

388 SZABÓ JÚLIA All these thoughts have some historical background and antecedents. The first circle can be brought in relation with a longliving iconological tradition which had been based on the material qualities of the cedar-wood and cedar-oil and its significance in the history of civilisation. Being a pharmacologist Csontváry should have known such classical authors as Pliny, Theophrast and Dioscuride. Other literary works by Latin authors like Horace's De arte poetica and Persius First Satire attached some aesthetical value to the cedar-oil. Both of them described literary works worthy of being soaked in cedar-oil, worthy of preservation for eternal life. The use of the cedar motif as a symbol of wisdom is based upon the Bible where it occurs also as a metaphor (Eccl. Sir. 24:17) This meaning is mentioned also in Medieval commentaries to the Bible. In the Renaissance a new synthesis of Pagan and Christian interpretations was born concerning the cedar-tree. The „hieroglyph" conception of Pierio Valeriano and later the Iconology of Cesare Ripa and Zaratino Castellini introduced a lot of new concepts of images fusing the Antique and Christian traditions. All of them agreed that the cedar is the „hieroglyph" of eternity, of permanent life and values. For Csontuáry the most important source of inspiration must have been the Old Testament. He wrote in his autobiography that a Picture -Bible was always open on the table of the family during his childhood. Though he didn't mention that he had seen any pictures representing cedar trees before his voyage to the Lebanon, I should suggest that he must have had some ideas about them before. He could have seen illustrated Bibles, and a lot of reports in the papers of the time on the land of the cedars and on the tree itself. In the 1850-s a Hungarian painter called Antal Ligeti visited the Lebanon and made several drawings and paintings on the spot. Other painters, like Bálint Юзе created a dreamworld in the 19

th с about the ancient homeland of the Hungarian people putting it to Media or other territories of the Ancient Near East. These suggestions were accompanied by „ethymological studies" concerning Hungarian historical names of persons and places. Thus one of the ancestors of the Hungarian Árpád dynasty (the first Royal family 1000—1301 A. D.), Álmos was named according to the suggestions of 19

th с ethymologists by the name of the „Cedar of Lebanon" („almyggim"). This Hebrew name form for the cedar was thought to be false already by Linné and Christopher Trew in the 18

th c, but it didn't trouble the Hungarian Romantical ethymologists. It was too obvious that the cedar emblem, — which had been used to express the glory and power of Solomon and of other great rulers in the ancient times, — could be the only proper symbol for the very first father of the nation. Bálint Kiss made several compositions where Álmos was represented by this emblem. In his book Magyar régiségek (Hungarian antiquities. Pest, 1839) he described a lot of details about his ideas of ancient life and cults of the Hungarians. Similarly to Ripa's Iconology Bálint Kiss' work might serve as a source of inspiration for the painters of his age as well as for any artist who tried to continue this tradition. This was the main source of Csontváry's thoughts in connection with the cedar motif and the Hungarian past. In his Pilgrimage to the Cedars oi Lebanon he represented a cultic dance around the trees which looks very similar to the suggestions about the ancient tree -cult of the Hungarians. This motif has also a more general meaning. It reflects a many of the current thoughts concerning the history of religions. Let us think to the studies of Carl Boetticher on the tree-cult of the Greeks and the huge work of /. G. Frazer concerning tree and vegetation cults all over the world. The antecedents of Csontuáry in the history of European painting are to be found in Romantical Historicism. Near its German representatives like Carl Rottmann and others, one can mention John Martin, whose large heroic landscapes (Fall oi Babylon, Fall of Niniue etc.) anticipated the works of Csontváry in their conceptions and forms. His last painting, the Plains oi Heaven (1853) represents cedars and a cultic dance of angels (?) or nymphs (?) very similar to those of Csontváry's composition painted some sixty years later. On the other hand Csontváry is so deeply affected by the Hungarian concepts of a mythical past that his works could not have been but proper archeological -historical representations. His Biblical references and Oriental images connected him to his Hungarian antecedents of the 19

th с and also to the greatest of his Hungarian contemporaries, the poet Endre Ady. Ady had also a mythology of his own concerning the past, the present and the future of the Hungarian people. He felt a tragical loneliness in the history of the nation and sometimes represented it by describing lonely trees. He used the image of the cedarwood only once in connection with private life in his poem „I sing so the Song of Songs", where he laments over the missing of an eternal love and life. It is quite sure that Ady's concept of the cedar symbol was very near to that of Csontuáry'

s Solitary cedar. In his Pilgrimage to the Cedars oi Lebanon Csontváry formed an icon of the cedar motif, in the Solitary cedar he made a manument to the negative time conception of the 20

th с thought.