Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)
Tanulmányok / Studies - Imre Györgyi: A modell / The Model
After Ingres won the Prix de Rome in 1801 his picture entitled The Valpiçon Bather, painted in Rome (1808), elevated to an academic paradigm the subject of a bathing woman, an odalisque or a woman combing her hair, along with the re-interpreted topic of painting after live nude models (sur le motif). John. L. Connolly revealed the fact that on the compound allegory of The Great Odalisque (1814. Cat, 1-13) the painter leads one into the spiritual world of form by presenting the five senses. The viewer approaches the interpretation of the symbolics of the works with the equal fervour of the intellect as of the senses. 41 Ingres sought ideal beauty by focusing on imagination and the 'inner vision' of the artist: on his painting The Dream of Ossian (1813, Montauban, Musée Ingres) he blends the classicist concept of l le beau idéale' with the romantic northern iconography of 'the wild genius' —to quote Werner Hofman's interpretation —transposing it to the 'intimate love' (tendre amitié) between artist and muse, concurrently portraying the muse as his lover. 42 Gerard's Ossian was copied by many on the basis of John Godfroy's print, Károly Kisfaludy supposedly being among them as well. (Cat. VI-34) The iconography of the artist-genius whose inspiring muse is also his lover lived on in many variations in 19th and 20th-century Hungarian paintings. 4 ' (Cat. Vl-43, 42, 44) Ágost Canzi 44 —the only student of Ingres who worked in Hungary —created his now errant oil painting Faun and Bacchante in 1827 in Paris, after a mural painting in Herculaneum. 45 (III. 5) Fifty years later the erotic pictures of Mihály Zichy made in Paris were supposedly still inspired by the prints of erotic series from the Italian Mannerism. 46 (Cat. 1-5) Principles of the Renaissance lived on, through the oeuvre of Poussin, in the tradition of training of the French academy. 4 " The application of some students to be allowed a female model in their cells was officially rejected even in 1790, and the regulation was also strictly adhered to by the French Academy of the Villa Medici in Rome. 48 In Jacques Louis David's studio located in the Ecole it was permitted. 49 In 1835 Ingres made a note of the fact that till the end of his life (1829) Leo XII kept 'the divine Capitoline Venus' locked away in a cabinet and would show it only with special permission.'" At the Academy of Vienna, however, reform-age artists were not allowed to draw nudes after female models —the word 'female' in the section on male nude models had been subsequently crossed out from among the privileges of the statute granted by the empress Maria Theresia —it could only be done at home, in studios or private studio-academies. 1 ' This is how Károly Marko the Elder posed female nudes in his studio in Italy, and perhaps it was here in Rome in 1835 that Miklós Barabás made both the nude drawing and the watercolour (Cat. VI-2—3—4) featured at the present exhibition. 52 Carl Rahl (1812-1865) started to paint live female nude model after returning from the revolutionary Paris via Munich to Vienna in 1850: his Bacchante Reclining was copied by Alajos Györgyi-Griegel (1855), Károly Lötz and Rudolf Grimm as well. 51 (Cat. V-38) According to Pevsner up to the 1850s life-drawing after female models was not allowed in practically all state art academies, while the 19th-century programmes of official academies detached themselves at the very out set from following new tendencies. 54 The words of Imre Henszlmann illustrate the situation: 'Posing women models is not usually allowed in academies, whereas children and old men tend not to be used; thus beginners are constrained to paint middle-aged or young men (mainly soldiers)...'.' 5 The San Fernando Academy —where the posing of even male models was for a long time prohibited — and the London Academy —where, first in the line, at the foundation of the Royal Art Society on 28th November 1768 the posing of different kinds of female nude models was actually assigned as a task —were both anomalies. This was the result of the legal status of academies: functioning wholly as private enterprises. The concession therefore was not the consequence of a more open-minded attitude —since female students were not admitted to academies till 1863 at all, and permitted to do life drawing until 1893, and even then, the model had to be 'partially draped'. A similar 'Victorianism' is described by an old student in 1841-1842 in Berlin, where the classical statues were covered with salmon coloured trunks and the Venus de Medici with a shawl. Female models in lifeclasses were introduced in Stockholm in 1839, in Naples in 1870, in Berlin in 1875, but still not allowed in 1873-1875 at the Royal College of Art in London. 56 The special attraction of drawing female nudes, denied to artists even in the last quarter of the 19th century, is attested by Van Gogh's letter written from the Academy of Antwerp in 1885 or 1886 to his brother Theo: 'Nude female models are not used in the academy at all and only as a great exception in private. [...1 I'm sure in Paris the situation is somewhat better, and believe that one can learn a lot from the continuous comparison of the male and female body as they are totally different at all times and in all aspects. This can be a "difficulté suprême", but what would become of art and life without them?" Beyond the object of the face expressing passion —to be discussed later on —the 'human body' at the painting academies of Europe for a long time only meant therefore the male body. 5 * The academic method —just as Poussin recommended art students to check the effect of light and shadow on a live model first —contented itself to a certain extent with male models or even with the body of the artist himself. 59 Contrary to 19th-century science, 60 that was just discovering the difference between the sexes, an androgynous beauty was placed at the centre of classicist academic values of J. J. Winckelmann and of J. L. David. The body of this standard of beauty characterised by aesthetic totality and harmony was modelled on classical statues where 'the surface of the skin [...] is not taut, but instead fits gently onto the healthy flesh, though filling it without any kind of inflated exuberance [...]. The surface of the skin lacks the wrinkles that are independent and separate from the flesh, unlike our bodies.' 6 'According to
