Köpröczi Rózsa: A grafikus Szőnyi. Rajzok, vázlatok, tanulmányok (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Szőnyi István Alapítvány, Szentendre – Zebegény, 1996)

CHARCOAL STUDIES TO THE FRESCOS OF GYŐR "First of all let us learn to draw in charcoal. This is the best and most instructive technique with a wide range of possibilities. ...drawing can be best combined with painterly approach in this kind of technique." (SZŐNYI ISTVÁN: A RAJZ, P. 14. A KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZET ISKOLÁJA, KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZETI ALAP KIADÓVÁLLALATA, BR, 1976.) The year of 1941 brought an important commission of Szőnyi's career. He had long been desiring for trying his skills in solving a monumental task. He won the competition for painting the frescos of Saint Emery church of Győr, so he was given the possibility to realize his painterly ideas on the "big wall" as well. This challenge was completely new, as never before did he have to defer to the expectations of a commissioner. A panel picture or a drawing are individual genres. The work finished either will get on the wall of a flat or it will be encountered by the public in the intimate interior of an exhibition hall or a graphic cabinet. But to create a fresco - especially inside a public building - demands a completely different approach. A commissioner would like to see and suggest his own ideas through the artist. The individuality of the artist is inevitably pushed into the background and submitted to the program. The genre has other restrictions as well. The distances, the illuminations of the wall and the rules of liturgy all have to be taken into consideration. Szőnyi had to represent the unity and inseparability of religion and everyday life on the continual wall surface - missing an altar-piece - of Saint Emery church of Győr. The program involved the Ascension, the Apotheosis of Christ, the symbols of the apostles, the teaching Church, the punishing Church, the patronizing Church, the almsgiver Church and the helping Church, Mary and the little Jesus as well as Hungarian saints. The solution of the apsis is the most authentic, as he could apply here the methods he experimented in panel pictures. Szőnyi's ideas on light were very different from those of Christian light-mysticism realised in Baroque religious paintings. The indispensable elements of Baroque "teátrum sacrum" are the materialised light-beams the starting-point of which is a definite form attributed with divine contents, while with Szőnyi this kind of centre dissolves into thin air, expressing this way the presence of an invisible transcendent idea. The figures having received the grace of God are covered with inconceivable, mystic light, while those "left in the shadow" are much more colourful. Though the fresco wonderful in its details did not become a homogeneous unity, its quality is high above that of the works of contemporary religious art. The challenge was great. The master in the middle of his career, who had been leading the mural faculty of the College of Fine Arts for a few years, took the task seriously, and began to make thorough preparations. He made hundreds of studies, and collected faces and types systematically. He needed to find new charaters especially for the transcendent figures. This time he made real studies after real models. We can find instructions to this genre in the "School of Fine Arts". "Let us set the model or the object to be drawn so that light and shadow proportion should divide the structure in a meaningful way ...it would be a mistake to start form minute details ... the general impression would fade then."* His interest was aroused by faces, but he also took Ids time working out the rhythm of a particular gesture, and was experimenting patiently until he found the most beautiful solutions. He got to the final versions through several variations of representations of kneeling and praying people, flitting female figures and the dignified figure of Christ. He spent a lot of time on observing an interesting position of hands or feet, or the fall of draperies. * Szőnyi István: A rajz, p. 15. A képzőművészet iskolája, Képzőművészeti Alap Kiadóvállalata, Bp., 1976.