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

Katalógus / Catalogue - V. Venus-minták / Models of Venus - Jávor Anna: A női akt a bécsi akadémián / The Female Nude at the Vienna Academy

The Female Nude at the Vienna Academy ANNA JÁVOR [SUMMARY] Vienna's first academy of art - founded in 1688 by the painter Peter Strudel (1660-1714), on his return home from a study tour in Italy - introduced the free spirit and accomplished practice of Venetian art training to Austria. Its lecturers and students were mostly employees of the court, and with the death of Strudel, its director, it disbanded in 1714. Jacob van Schuppen (1670-1751), a portraitist and painter of historical themes, became a member of the Paris Academy in 1705, after his studies with Nicolas de Largillière but before his employment at the court of Lorraine. Of Flemish extraction, Van Schuppen arrived in Vienna in 1716 in the service of Prince Eugene of Savoy. It was in the Habsburg capital that, nine years later, he approached the emperor with a plan for a French-type art academy. Vienna's Imperial-Royal Academy of Art (K. k. Akademie der bildenden Künste) was unprecedented in Central Europe and long remained the most important institution of its kind in the Germanspeaking territories. Customarily, up until the first third of the 18th century, art students in the region undertook study trips to Italy to the studios of famous artists and to the academies of Venice, Bologna and Rome, whenever the generosity of patrons made this possible. Such experiences could be obtained indirectly by the next generation, while for later students scholarships to Rome were available from 1772 on. The basis of art education was drawing. Beginners learnt the rules of representing the human body and of geometry through copying. There were stocks of engravings and drawings in each academy showing details of the face and the body, along with copies of foreign works drawn from live models. Jacob van Schuppen, the director of the first Vienna academy, had brought with him several such works from France, where he had worked previously, and he himself drew heads, ears, hands, feet, and expressions of various emotions after Le Brun's example. In addition to copies of antique statues and other plasterwork, twentyfour finely elaborated female nude drawings were transferred from Karl Loth's Venetian painting school (where Strudel had studied) to Vienna. These served generations of students as the almost the only models available for the representation of female figures. For a long time, women could not pose in the nude at the large public academies. Nor were female models employed by the more practical engraving school launched in 1766 by Jacob Matthias Schmutzer but merged with the Vienna academy in 1772. The ban on nude female models applied despite the fact that - with reference to Paris experiences - the school's original programme had offered nude models of both sexes. In principle, up to 1920 women were excluded from education at the academy, although ministerial permissions testify to exceptions from 1872 onwards. Despite all this, back in the 18th century three "paintresses" were admitted as ordinary members of the Vienna academy. Some of more numerous surviving male nude drawings were indeed made from nature. From 1734 onwards, there was a competition announced every spring - for prizes of money -, and the drawings produced were then copied. The posture of the model often adopted some example - some pictorial convention - in connection with the sculptural models of classical antiquity. The "classic" seated pose spread far and wide from the Carraccis' academy in Bologna was later used to represent the figure of St. John the Baptist; another frequent topos was a foreshortened lying figure ("ritirare in iscorcio", practically an emulation of Michelangelo's figure) used especially for falling figures - i.e. Satan, demons - on ceiling frescos. A knowledge of anatomy was also required for the rendering of female figures, and - within the framework of Christian iconography - nudity had to be shown. Among the finest academy works glorifying the female nude are representations of the apotheosis of art: the theme was often among the topics of the competition for the grand prize of the academy in the 18th century. In his prize-winning masterpiece of 1750, Franz Anton Maulbertsch still shows Academy covered with some drapery at the feet of armoured Minerva, her exposed bosoms alluding, perhaps, to the concept of the "alma mater". In a later rendering, however, the female figure is wholly exposed, similarly to the allegory of religious toleration engraved in copper, in keeping with the customary representation of the "naked truth" canonised in Baroque iconographie manuals in this way. Some known drawings suggest that live nude models were used at certain private academies, although there is far more information concerning the copying of a master's own drawings, or of the illustrations in the art handbooks. Most figurai compositions were made after sculptures, plaster copies or most often works of graphic art: an immense number of such aids feature in inventories of the posthumous papers of artists in the 18thandl9th centuries. Georg Raphael Donner created his small-sized Venus, which survives in several copies as the pair of Mercury, after the Medici Venus, through the mediation of a plaster copy, or perhaps an engraved reproduction, in the 1730s. His endeavours were deeply influenced by the French and Italian Mannerist small sculptures - then thought