Agria 38. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2002)

Bakó Zsuzsanna: Egy „nemzeti toposz” születése. Gondolatok Székely Bertalan Egri Nők című képe kapcsán

Zsuzsanna Bakó The Birth of a "National Icon" Some Thoughts on Bertalan Székely's Painting "The Women of Eger" Hungarian historical painting has produced a handful of works whose very appearance, or indeed the mere mention of which, conjures up a whole period or indeed an entire genre. Bertalan Székely's The Women of Eger is one such work. Painted in 1867 and purchased by the Eger Women's Philanthropic Association, something which was standard practice at the time, it was then presented to the Hungarian Collection of the Hungarian National Museum. The picture's success is due partly to the fact that it satisfied the artistic requirements of the time, namely patriotism and heroism. In the period between 1850 and 1875 painting tended to concentrate on subjects wracked with national suffering executed in a romantic academic style. These were images still stoked by passions lingering on from the noble yet failed aspirations of the 1848-49 War for Freedom, being strictly moralistic in tone and expressed in a vocabulary rich in symbolism. Those works executed by the very best practitioners of the genre: Mór Than, Viktor Madarász, Bertalan Székely ... address the some of the subjects dearest to the Hungarian soul: national independence and its most recent setbacks. The defeat at the Battle of Mohács and the execution of László Hunyadi both provided models for the depictions of the defence of castles like that in Eger. As a result the topic was to receive many different treatments - more often than not as part of a series of historical scenes. Székely had pondered on the idea of an epic national picture for many decades, something which we know about from letters he wrote to Kocsárd Kuun, the Lord Lieutenant of Hunyad County, and József Eötvös (minister of culture from 1876). We do not know exactly what he had in mind, but between 1857 and 1885 Székely worked on seven different topics, primarily on the subject of liberation struggles, particularly involving battles against the Turks. The figures populating his pictures are bound together by a patriotism which Székely referred to as "national sentiment": it was this emotion that King Louis and his soldiers died for at the Battle of Mohács, Zrinyi's warriors fell for at Szigetvár and the defenders of Eger Castle fought so tirelessly for. The choice of topic was extremely important for Székely as his works depicting the Turkish menace were a matter not merely of the defence of Hungary but of the values held by Christendom as a whole. The topic Székely settled for was the 1552 siege of Eger Castle, during which István Dobó and his handful of soldiers and women, the young and old, showed great heroism and fortitude in managing to hold out against a Turkish army which 323