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

this ideal of beauty Venus and Mercury who were shown embracing each other on the mural in Herculaneum are now portrayed as one person. An example of it is one of the popular mythological themes of the Academy of Vienna on Jupiter the seducer, who uses a female body as a disguise, as can be seen on the pictures entitled Diana and Callisto by Johann Ender or Károly Marko the Elder. (Cat. V-34) Gyula Benczúr's female figure on his early Munich-made painting entitled The Dream of the Lady Artist is of a similarly masculine physique.

62 (Cat. VII-11) The goddess depicted with her back to us on Károly Lotz's After Bathing recalls the classical nude of the Louvre's sleeping hermaphrodite who is depicted from the back. (Cat. 111-24, III. 6) Lötz applied 'Boucher's' female face to his Amours and Psyches equally. The notions of the ideals of autonomous academies merely signify reinterpretations in each age.

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' Martin Warnke sees the reason for this in the characteristic forms established in the princely courts of Europe, providing a base for the future treatment of art and artists: e.g. their special status, academic training and the handling of works of art as intellectual products. 'In as much as the princely courts employed this genius who was fashioned after classical theories they in fact alienated him from his autonomous destiny.'

64 From the mid-18th century and Maria Therese's Ratio Educationis, instruction in good taste appears in the academies that were multiplying throughout Europe'

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" along with industrial production

—the utilitarian objective of promoting commerce

—which with its 'modern' attitude dealt the academies' 'autonomous' set of values

—regulated on the basis of doctrines

—a powerful blow. Demands of modernity led to similar consequences in interpreting the ties between the female body and its nude depiction. In one of his texts Goya mocks the inquisition for prohibiting the use of female nude models by saying that no-one can stop him from doing this in his own studio. (Cat. 1-12) In spite of this, Goya's Naked Maja was the first painting in Spain to show a female nude since Velázquez' Rokeby Venus.

hh Moral judgement over the research of the human body was the monopoly of the Inquisition, questioned seriously for the first time by scientists of the Enlightenment.

6 The banning of female models from academies became unsustainable. The real anatomical presentation of women

—beyond the knowledge connected to childbearing

—focused for centuries on the role of the face for expressing emotions.

68 In the Académie Royale of Paris it became the theme of an individual contest that was named the competition of expressive face, established by Count Caylus in 1760. Le Concours de Tête d'Expression was also included among the academic tenders for the Prix de Rome of the École which was reformed after the revolution.

69 Although the form of the competition related to the human body with the period's most modern physiological method, it reverted to the 17th-century principles of education of Charles Le Brun and served as the preparatory task to historical painting." The subject of the contest was based on the physiological presence of the model whose expression of passion had to be portrayed on a life-size picture. According to the regulations professors were only allowed to choose young models whose appearance and features reflected neither uncouthness, nor poverty, nor roughness, so that the competition study should lead to the expression of beautiful forms.

71 Károly Brocky, whose name is featured among the students in Paul Delaroche's 1858 memorial album, 2 travelled to Paris before 1838 and supposedly made at this point a part of his life-sized portraits expressing emotions. (Cat. TV-3) Due to J.-A. Allais reproducing some of these works on prints

—such as the expression of passion entitled Innocence

—the pictures could have subsequently functioned as specimen sheets, similarly to the lithographed sheets collected at Julien, Ravaisson or Bargue's Cours de Dessins. (Cat. V-l 8-19-20) As the continuation of academic tradition classical statues and their plaster copies or lithographs made from them were also the models of expressions of passion. Both Niobe's and the Amazon's faces as the symbol of sufferance and grief were academic models for centuries; their use can be recognised from the sketches of Caracci to Auguste Rodin's Portrait of Mme de Séverine,'' (III. 7) as well as the György Zala's Magdolna and Miklós Fémes Beck's Singing Woman. (Cat. V-23-24-25) When, on 3rd October 1846 Giacomo Antonio Marastoni (Jakab Marastoni), relying on his connection with the academies of Vienna and Venice, opened in Pest-Buda the First Hungarian

—imperial and royal

— Painting Academy,

74 he declared, in accordance with his liberal objective, that at the institute 'youths from both sexes will receive full education and will be initiated into a superior form of art.' The drawing of female nudes, however, was not conducted in the school,

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' despite the fact that the standards of the paintings that originated from here were the academic conventions of Venice. The emblematic pictures of the Marastoni Academy became those semi-nude portraits within idealised settings for which expressions of passion and costume pictures served as bases.

76 Jakab Marastoni himself, however, modelled his paintings after 'his beautiful wife Johana Bianki'. (Cat. 111-15; VI1-12) It was not only Marastoni's semi-nudes expressing emotions that caused an upheaval in the Budapest press. In 1847 a journalist of Pesti Divatlap [Pest Fashion Magazine] thought the expression of passion of the painting entitled Good Mother 'doesn't quite correspond to the title of the picture. It is more a treacherous fire and secret lust rather than good-natured female kindliness that radiates from the penetrating glance of the good mother's big black eyes...'

77 Henszlmann reacted to the erotic attraction of Marastoni's Greek Woman with his often quoted outburst: 'The ill-concealed frivolity in the approach and the provocation of the half-masked bosom [...] with which year by year the unmanly Italian painter dazzles the eyes of the public of Budapest managed once again to seduce the association into buying one of his pictures. However, the industrious blending of colours (Vertreiben) and the coquetting with the spectator's sensuality, which out of propriety we dare