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

not approach within half a gunshot, is by no means art.'

78 Henszlmann's opinion reflected the moment when, alongside the factual material of natural sciences exhibited in the museums, the new environment paired the ambivalent feelings connected to the notion of beauty with evidently profane contents.

79 From 1850, with the appearance of female nude photography, a radical change came about within moments in the use of pictorial antecedents. Delacroix reports on this change in his diary. When the photographer Eugene Durieu started taking painterly photographs

—supposedly in poses that were set up by the painter

—on 20th May 1853 Delacroix noted the following: 'After dinner my guests had a look at my photographs, the gift of the kind and helpful Durieu. / The day before yesterday I involuntarily learnt a lesson I now wanted to share with them. First I put the photographs in front of them: they had been taken of naked models and some of the stunted or inflated bodies presented an unpleasant sight indeed. Once they had thoroughly examined the photographs I took out Marcantonio's prints. We were immediately confronted by the gross mistakes, the mannerism and affectedness of the prints. We felt they were repellent and almost disgusting in spite of their style; now this sole value of theirs had also lost its effect. / In reality if daguerreotype photography is used properly by a highly talented person it can ascend to hitherto unseen summits.' On 19th November Delacroix refers again in his diary to the experience, having seen Delesser's collection of photographs of Marcantonio Raimondi's prints: 'What an awkward sensation seized me when comparing them with photographs taken from life.'"" On 6th October 1854 he writes: 'I have also been working on the Odalisque. I drafted it in Paris and I am preparing it after a Daguerreotype picture.'"

1 (Cat. V/-7-11, III. 8-9) Up till now in Hungarian photography no nude photograph has been identified as having been used for artistic purposes, even though Jakab Marastoni was among the first to introduce daguerreotypes in his 1841 exhibition in Budapest.

82 However, from the 1870s in the library of the Model Drawing School we come across nude albums of artistic objectives as the standard aids in live studies.'

83 Among them the books of the experimental photography of Eadweard Muybridge who, recording the phases of movement of live bodies, surpassed every visual model in his academic lecture on movement. (Cat. IX-6) Paul Richer's Anatomie Artistique (Artistic Anatomy, 1889)—formerly known as Grand Richer

—was followed in 1895 by his book entitled Physiologie artistique de l'homme en movement, which presented the physiology of the human body in motion. It showed, based on photographic experience, the mechanical structure of the male and female body in the course of different types of movement demonstrated on diagrams (for example Nude Descending the Stairs). (Cat. IX-7) Painter-teacher Bertalan Székely not only obtained these works for the Model Drawing School but he himself continuously explored the relationship of body, movement and image with home-made teaching aids

—as is indicated by his correspondence with Etienne Jules Marey.

84 It is an interesting and so far undiscovered element in the history of Hungarian photography that Jakab Marastoni's grandson György Markos took part in the Hungarian dance group that pursued the art of dance and movement of Isadora Duncan both as a photographer and as a dancer nude or dressed in an ancient-style toga.

85 (See ill. 21, Cat. 1X-10 -1, 2) The 'national' nude The artist is 'the translator of all nature', traducteur

—as Valenciennes wrote in 1808

86

—whose most complex task is the depiction of man. This is why he required the painter to have an understanding of anatomy and the movement of the body. In addition

—apart from the application of perspective

—he demanded a general knowledge of chemistry, physics and natural sciences. As we shall see later on, Bertalan Székely in the last quarter of the 19th century stipulated encyclopaedic knowledge as the requirement of the Model Drawing School of Budapest in order to be able to compose a picture in a scientific way, thus 'presuming a dissembling and an appropriate assembling'.

87 With the depiction of the human body the expectations with regard to works of art also became more complex. Oskar Bätschmann linked the transformed expression chef d'

œuvre to a creative process overburdened with knowledge.

88 This process presented itself together with that concept formed in Europe which

—as we mentioned at the beginning of this study

—wanted to display national culture in a single building where encyclopaedic knowledge would be embraced. Changeaux, who explored the foundation of the French Muséum National, emphasised the significance for fine arts of the wide-ranging influence of the Grand Encylopédie, or rather that Diderot and D'Alembert 'between 1762 and 1772, with their unprecedented iconographie work published eleven illustrated volumes of the Encylopédie about the history of mankind'.

89 The concept of a museum, also accommodating the Academy of Fine Arts, was formulated according to the Convent's decree of 1793, which reverberated the words of Quatremère de Quincey in 1791, lifted out of the Grand Encylopédie into the decree of the Convent. In 1796 Emeric David's suggestion for the establishment of a museum of contemporary art was linked to it too.

90 The idea of the Hungarian National Museum (formulated in 1807)

91

, that was founded by Ferenc Széchényi (1802)—in its name and Utopian notion, gathering both the liberal and mechanic arts in one building

—was closer to the draft of the Parisian Muséum National. The aim of the founder must have been the setting up of a Hungarian 'centre' that would give a home to encyclopaedic knowledge, so far existent only in his own library. The first design was completed in 1807 by János Hild

92 and offered a spontaneous bond between natural sciences and fine arts within the building of the Museum. In acknowledgement of his work Ferenc Széchényi was made an honorary mem-