Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Katalógus / Catalogue - II. Venus Anatomica / Venus Anatomica - Horányi Ildikó: A női test az anatómiai ábrázolások tükrében / The Female Body in the Eight of Anatomical Representations

thet "Venus Anatomica". The prototypes of the wax models were Italian Baroque sculptures, although a century later Baroque dynamic composition became calmer and less pathetic under the influence of moderate Neoclassicism. In the second half of the 18th century, obstetrics and gynaecology - liberated from their long bar on men - could occupy their rightful places among the acknowledged medical disciplines and their specialist literatures could increase. There was a boom in enlightening works written for midwives, as there was in textbooks on obstetrics and female diseases. The illustrations were now restricted to the meticulously detailed representation of the female genitalia and of embryos, hence for such specialist areas anatomy no longer used the full-length female figure. A crucial subject was the secret of childbirth. However, it was only with the introduction of microscopy that cellular embryology could evolve as a discipline and define - for example - the concept of the nucleus or the process of menstruation. It was gradually realised in the 18th century that the differences between the male and the female genitalia were breaking the principle of correspondence asunder. An independent terminology of the female sex organs evolved, and the structures so far seen as common to both men and women (skeleton, nervous system) began to be differentiated. The background disputes in the spirit of the Enlightenment - e.g. about the social origins and the equality or inequality of the sexes - already attributed decisive importance to the body in their answers. The differences that needed interpretation were subjects for polemics. The works on proportions showed the different proportions of the male and the female body, interpreting them from the outset according to the current aesthetic approach, whereas in anatomical works no female constitutional differences were touched on apart from the specific genitalia. In 1759, JeanJoseph Sue, a surgeon and a professor of the French Academy of Art, published a French translation of Alexander Monro's osteological work of 1726 (The Anatomy of the Humane Bones). This included a female skeleton in a landscape. Later he published fourteen of the engravings in an anatomical work for artists (1788) concentrating on the osteology of the body. Plate IV of this work shows the female skeleton demonstrating the points at which there are differences between the bones of the male and female bodies. In the course of the 19th century, Sue's skeleton became one of the two skeletons that aspired to be the canonized image of the female bone system. The other was the work of S. Th. von Soemmerring (Tabula sceleti feminini juncta descriptione, Utrecht, 1796). Von Soemmerring shared the conviction of Albinus, a Leiden scholar and the author of some of the finest atlases of the 18th century, that the task of the anatomist was similar to that of the artist. Both proclaimed that an anatomist obliged to measure the body against aesthetic norms had to create a perfect form of the human body that was similar to a work of art. Having also consulted artists, Soemmerring set the skeleton (minus the skull) of a twenty-year-old woman and the skull of a Georgian woman in the right posture and then compared them to the Medici Venus and the Venus in Dresden. However hard Soemmerring tried to surpass Sue's skeleton, he did not really succeed. Over-idealizing prevented him from sparing enough emphasis for points that would have shown up the real differences between the male and female bodies. In the end, Sue won: the broader pelvis and longer neck - allegedly characteristic of the female sex - came out victorious. In the 19th century, ideas about the genesis of the embryo became increasingly realistic. Although it was not yet settled whether the ovum or the semen was the "stronger" and the uni- and bisexual models still lived side by side, based on their own sexual categories women were gradually measured by different standards than men. Yet in the age of the emergence of the model of bisexuality, anatomy did not plunge into the researching of the other specificities of the female body. Perusing the anatomical atlases of the period, we see no such changes among either systematic or specific anatomical representations. The same applies to anatomy for artists. In the presentation of the basic characteristics of human anatomy, the male body had predominance. Although the idealized character of full-length figures prevailed throughout the 19th century (e.g. the smile on the face), the histrionic character of the figures disappeared. Man became the subject of rigorous scientific observation. The third group of anatomical representations of women include pictures that revive the tradition of the depiction of anatomical theatres and the portraiture of anatomists through the relationship of the female corpse and the anatomist (e.g. Hasselhorst's Professor Lucae Dissecting, 1864/66; G. Max's The Anatomist, 1869; E. Simonet's Tenia corazón, 1890). Among the precedents, one can list the iconographie framing themes of a peculiar German picture type of the 16th century, the eroticomacabre fitted into the ideological system of the vanitatum vanitas, contrasting the vanity of the splendid female body symbolising the ephemerality of beauty and delight with the monstrous figure of death. Not even in the naturalistic rendering of Baroque medical illus-