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

trations did the female body lose its beauty, and now the perfect female beauty was shown alabaster white, in bloodless lifelessness on a crudely hewn dissecting table, half covered with a white sheet. In the dark mysteriousness of the room the pensive anatomist is staring at the dead beauty, at the undecipherable secrets of life, feeling at a loss before human destiny, probably also sensing that by dissecting this beautiful body he will not get an inch closer to solving the mystery of life and death. In these pictures, the female body also indicates the correlation between love and death articulated by Romanticism; love as a state of mind became upgraded as the source of human universalism. The anatomist was faced with the boundaries of human knowledge, with the recognition that the human body was merely a tenement of clay, but that life was more than a "machine" built with strict rationality, more than the working of the body. While anatomical illustrations kept shifting towards impersonal, rigorous rendering, in the "anatomist and the woman" picture type anatomy regained its earlier credit and again became the subject of active contemplation. Appendix A professor of Wittenberg University appointed in 1594, János Jeszenszky, who had studied at Padua, regarded anatomy as the basis of medicine and introduced public dissections at the Protestant university (he carried out the first dissection in Prague of a human cadaver in 1600). He was one of the few Hungarian medical scientists whose name is known in connection with a number of new and original insights in anatomical research. Apart from him, Hungary has no great anatomist in whom it can take pride. When the material for the exhibition was selected, priority was given to the Hungarian sources. We concentrated on books available at home - although studying abroad afforded other possibilities as well -, because only local sources could exert a wider influence in the country. Hungarian anatomical education was dominated first by Latin and later by German (and a few French) anatomical works, in keeping with the linguistic affiliations current at the time. Medical studies could only be pursued in Hungary after 1769, when the Medical Faculty at the Pázmány University of Nagyszombat was founded. Earlier, Hungarian doctors were trained mostly at Dutch and German universities. On account of the late foundation and the relatively meagre resources of Nagyszombat University, anatomical instruction was not given proper weight, but there were also natural history and anatomical collections in Hungary. The Department of Anatomy at Nagyszombat University was set up in 1770. Its head was Vercel Trnka until 1784. In the lectures held in the monastery of the Trinitarians, osteology and dry anatomy were taught in summer, and animal carcasses and the bodies of executed persons were dissected in winter. In this period, the anatomical works of A. Schaarschmidts and J. B. Winslow served as the compulsory textbooks. When the university moved to Buda and then to Pest, the works of Albinus and F. J. Leber were required reading. From 1784, in addition to the lecture auditorium, several rooms in Hatvani utca were placed at the disposal of the department, one of them housing the growing anatomical collection. The wax models from the Fontana collection (these arrived from Vienna as a gift in 1789) were given a separate heated room. Cabinets and tables were made for the anatomical preparations, and Károly Hauptmann was commissioned to make preparations and to catalogue the collection. From 1786, people who died in hospitals could also be dissected. Between 1790 and 1812, however, only theoretical anatomy could be taught, and the teaching of practical anatomy only resumed with the arrival of the prosector Boldizsár Kieningen. In addition to making preparations, the prosector also ran the department's public museum. In 1827, Márton Csausz, the new chairman of the department, asked permission to dissect more than the annual two or three corpses. During Gsausz's period of leadership, A. F. H. Hempel's and E. A. Lauth's works were in use. In 1849, the Hungarian translation of the anatomy by József Hyrtl (1811-1894), who taught at Vienna University, came to the fore. The choice of textbooks was liberalised in 1850, when it was mainly Hyrtl's and C. E. Bock's textbooks along with Bock's atlas that were in use. K. Heitzmann's atlas was later the favourite, together with other German anatomies. A theatre well suited to the teaching of anatomy was first fitted out in 1878 in a new building on Üllői út where the expanded teaching staff could dissect as many as 120-150 corpses a year. One of the assistant lecturers was Kálmán Tellyesniczky, who later published the lectures he delivered to art students as a prominent cytologist and art anatomist under the title Anatomy for Artists. Together with Bertalan Székely's Anatomy for Painters, it was one of the first anatomies for artists written in Hungarian. The library of the University of Fine Arts preserves quite a number of anatomical works collected in the last decades of the 19th century thanks to various institutions teaching anatomy for artists. This collection reveals the variety of criteria according to which works were collected. However, since "academic" art education began very late in Hungary, there are in it no anatomies made prior to the 19th century, just as there are none - or very few - in other public libraries in the country. NOTE S 1 Ryft, Bualtherus Hermenius (1541) Das ist des Menschen (ider dein Selbst) Warhafftige Bveschreibung oder Anatomi... [Strassburg: B. Beck]; Estienne, Charles (1545) De dissectiane partium corporis bumani... Parisiis, Apud Simonem Colinaeum; Berengario da Carpi (1521) Commentaria cum amplissimus additionaibus super anatómia Mundini. Bononiae: H. de Benedictis. Laqueur, Thomas (1990) Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. ' Remmelin, Johannes (1613) Catoptri microcosmici visio prima, secunda, tertia. No place or publisher.