Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Györgyi Imre: Female Nude Imagery in

FEMALE NUDE IMAGERY IN 19TH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN ART BY GYÖRGYI IMRE Several contexts can be identified in which the female nude appears in the western art of the 19th century. In my dissertation I considered five aspects of its representation in the art of five Hungarian painters, and through them, in 19th-century Hungarian art. I looked upon the female nude as a visual form filled with notions concerning the attitudes of the autonomous artist: autonomy is a criterion for the representation of beauty and rapture, while the female nude, as an allegory of Visus or Pictura, is the medium of fiction, of the ideal. In accordance with the renaissance topos, the female nude became a document of the studio of the independent, anti-guild, that is to say, academic artist, whose purported privileges included the right to pose female nudes. This privilege made its way into the statutes of the academies, though the practice became general all over Europe only from the middle or end of the 19th century, with the exception of London (from 1768), Paris (ca. 1800) and Munich (from 1808). The 19th-century revaluation of the subject of the female nude was initiated in the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, in the painting of J.-L.-D. Ingres, in whose Bather of Valpinçon, painted in Rome in 1808, the new approach to ideas, the representation of their being originated in perception, was coupled with the dramaturgy of historical painting. Kenneth Clark thinks in a 19th-century way, that the European nude is tied up with the belief in completeness; let me add that in their teaching the 19th-century arts academies linked the representation of the female nude with the notion of an unity between 'eternal time' and the composition. In the dissertation I deal with that particular tradition of 19th-century Hungarian art which considered the establishment of an academy that respects the autonomous artist a prerequisite for the nation's membership in the club of civilized Europe. The following five aspects were considered in the representation of the female nude in 19thcentury Hungarian art: I. At the beginning of the period in question, the lack of a local academy of art and the weakness of the autonomous visual tradition which is usually guaranteed by academic values, made certain painters, who considered themselves academic, resort to dramaturgical conventions that did not necessitate the iconographie representation of the female nude. When identifying the woman - a body in Bálint Kiss's János Jablonczai Pethes Bids Farewell to His Daughter in the Window of the Leopoldsburg Prison in 1674 (1846), I also identify the subject/iconography of picture. The representation of the scene, I think, distanced itself from the source which presented the martyrdom of the preacher sentenced to the galley, and followed the iconography of filial love, the Caritas Romana. The focus on the didactic message, however, subdued the heroic eroticism of the female figure. II. With establishing his First Hungarian Academy of Painting (1846-1859), an institution that was in close alliance with the National Museum and was a 'scaled-down' version of the Venice Academy, Giacomo Antonio Marastoni (Jakab Marastoni, 1804-1860), who was of Italian birth, naturalized the Venetian nude painting tradition in Hungary. Though no female nudes were drawn there after live models, the emblematic pictures of the Marastoni Academy became those semi-nude ideal