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

customs in Magyar Titkok [Hungarian Secrets] 1844-1845, the creator of the 'extraordinarily outstanding genre pictures"

14 supposedly used foreign prints for the illustrations. In the Hungarian version the enlightened author disapprovingly exposes a girl named Rózsa from Budapest, who smeared herself in coal to be displayed among the wild animals as an 'African savage'. (Cat. 111-11 -1, 2) Nagy used for the accompanying illustration one of the prints that depicted half-naked African women, circulating at the time around the world in numerous variations. Age of Enlightenment stereotypes on the female body entered the domain of national fine arts 'Hungarianized': topics formed around the exotic woman or the so-called 'barbarian' and 'noble savage' partially blended in with romantic character traits. Perhaps Ignác Nagy's Prophecy and Miklós Barabás' oil painting entitled Travelling Gypsy Family

115 (1843, Cat. 111-12) shared a common costume representation for their bare-bosomed female figures. However, Károly Lotz's picture of a gypsy girl, published in Ország Tükre (National Mirror) (7//. 11) can be interpreted through a different Enlightenment topic which associated exotic women

—similarly to the Turkish women or odalisques resting and playing instruments

— with erotic and frivolous notions.

116 While artists were inspired by the presentation of the nations of the world, continuing the Renaissance traditions of Cosmographies, through prints and travelogues of documentational value, no more bathing women were exhibited in the National Museum's contemporary Art Gallery along with Jakab Marastoni's Greek Woman. The pictures of eastern women by their colleague Ágoston Canzi, inspired by French exoticism and painted from the 1820s onwards, only became part of the collection of the Budapest Picture Gallery in the 1930s. (Cat. 111-13) It was Johann Joachim Wincklemann's 'characterology'

—defined in connection with the Greek ideal of beauty

—that prepared the aesthetical parcels in which the traits of 'national beauty', constructed around abstract forms, were rooted. 'The Greeks created gods and men according to notions that rise above the common form of matter. The forehead and nose of the gods and goddesses practically make up a straight line. [...] we might suppose that this formation was just as characteristic of ancient Greeks as the flat nose of the Calmucks or the small eyes of the Chinese,' writes Wincklemann." Peter Camper's (1791) theory of proportion became part of the expansive educational material of the 19th century. (Cat. III-4) The anatomist regarded ancient Greek statues as the authentic documents of the bodies of ancient people and portrayed Europeans as the heirs of classical civilisation, corroborating his hypothesis anthropometrically as well.

11!f Gottfried Schadow's design book entitled Polyklet

—NationaT physionomieen (1835, Cat. III-6), published both in English and French, adopted from Camper the physiognomic comparison of ancient Greek statues with people outside Europe and applied it to Polyclitus' theory of proportion. (Cat. III-7) In his work that circulated among the libraries of European academies Schadow, through a pseudo-scientific principle based on the shape of the head, presents the 'evolution' of the female sex from Sarah Bartmann to the Venus de Medici in a 'mathematicallybased' chronology. Subsequently the European pictor doctus identifies the 'Grecian face' as a trait of the national character,'

19 artists of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy also recognised the 'faces' of their own women. In 1881 Bertalan Székely made a note of Schadow's work in his sketchbook ('Die Nationalphisiognomie') and started to paint Leda by choosing a model for a 'Grecian female face'. With this Székely complemented his earlier research: from the 1860s in the interest of Hungarian painting he had occupied himself with the question of national origins in connection with live studies. In an entry in 1871 he defines the source of national origins

—with reference to Geoffroy de Sainte-Hilaire

—in the climate, type and costume.

12

" Bertalan Székely drew a Grecian head for the bathing woman he painted at the beginning of the 1880s and placed next to her a Greek vase, just as Károly Lötz did with his resting bacchante and bayadere or Grecian girl who represents the allegory of arts on the ceiling pieces of both the old and new Art Hall. (Cat. 111-27, 23; VII-1S) In addition to this Lötz painted a multitude of Grecian and eastern odalisques, the series of which was opened among others by After the Bath (around 1880, Cat. 111-24). Interwoven with Budapest's urban representation

—to be discussed in further detail later

—these works appointed him the 'Hungarian painter of nudes'. During the next four decades Lötz painted nudes within idealised surroundings that were accompanied by Grecian, national and also imperial symbols on the walls of various public buildings of Budapest

—from the High Court to the Fashion hall or the Hapsburg room of the royal palace. The pictures have a strong link with the style of his teachers at the academy, principally with the historic fresco painting of his Viennese master Carl Rahl, related to the Nazarene Carstens. By way of recognition in 1901 the state bought from the 'Hungarian painter of nudes' his Bathing Woman, who is shown standing in the eastern pose of an odalisque accompanied by a Greek jug, to represent the artist in the new domestic collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.

121 (Cat. Vll-18) In 1863-1864 Carl Rahl's students

—who had taken an essential part in the reforms of the Academy of Vienna

— Frigyes Feszi, Károly Lötz and Mór Than, were commissioned with the painting of murals from the story of Prince Argyrus and Fairy Helen for the exterior and interior decoration of the Vigadó.

122 Its programme was based on Arnold Ipoly's Hungarian Mythology

. This became the starting point of a new kind, yet at the same time Hellenic and oriental-style of mural painting. Arnold Ipolyi's Hungarian Mythology (1854) rewrote Greek mythology in Hungarian. 'The author perused the existing "mythological literature" and used a vast source material for his work: legends, myths, folk superstition, beliefs, prejudice, the "eastern" folklore (e.g. Arabian Nights) and, thanks to Reguly, the Finnish material too.' Ipolyi opposed the principles of natural science, the followers of evolutionism and