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

representative exhibition hall, next to which art associations

—for instance, the Kisfaludy Literary Society and the Fine Arts Union

—the conservatoire and the Society of natural science and medicine were also accommodated. According to Henszlmann's original plan the place of the latter was intended for the academy of fine arts.""* Eventually the National Hungarian Model Drawing and Art Teacher Training School (today University of Fine Arts) opened in October 1871 not as an academy, but connected instead to the restructured university of Budapest"

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' and the direct model for its concept of training was provided not by the Academy of Vienna, but by the art school linked to the Museum für Kunst und Industrie.

166 The 'novel' programme of this Viennese art school was elaborated by Rudolf Eitelberger, former teacher at the academy of Bertalan Székeky,"

1 and united the feat of polytechnics and art schools. Both Gottfried Semper's South Kensington Museum

—built as part of the Egyptian pavilion of the 1851 London world exhibition

— and his Plan for the Ideal Museum of 1852 became benchmarks for Eitelberger in the forming of his principles on education that assigned art to industry. As Semper said: 'Only if art and science penetrate each other mutually and all human relations become imbued by them will national education achieve its fulfilment."

68 In 1878 Bertalan Székely and Gusztáv Keleti travelled to London to gain firsthand experience of the model.

169 The Model Drawing School opened temporarily in Rumbach Sebestény Street,

170 near the clinics of the University of Medicine (in Újvilág, today Semmelweis, Street), Szent Rókus Hospital and the National Museum. Its curriculum almost self-evidently established close links to the Clinics and Collections of the University of Medicine. As the first token of the common root of art and medicine the founder Joseph II donated the newly launched University of Medicine of Budapest (1789) a wax Venus, made in Florence as part of Renaissance workshop traditions of an example of a god assuming human likeness.

1 ' The coloured anatomical wax figure

—a real rarity of the Theatre of Anatomy

—displayed in the form of the Venus de Medici the organs and innards of the female body. While the posing of nude models in the Model Drawing School was not resolved even as late as 1881,

172 the teaching of life-studies, anatomy and composition was developed in a rigorous scientific system designed by Bertalan Székely. Mór Kármán, who taught pedagogy (and among other things psychology) at the Model Drawing School, collaborated closely in it with Székely. Between 1871 and 1874 the lectures of artistic anatomy were held by Dr Pál Plósz (1871) and Ede Szilágyi (1871-1873),

173 both of them members of the Hungarian Society of Natural Science. After both teacher-doctors were appointed elsewhere Bertalan Székely took over the subject. Gusztáv Keleti describes this in the following way: 'Lectures in anatomy were suspended in the academic year of 1874/75, but took on a great impetus in 1875/76, when Bertalan Székely painter-teacher started to hold them. He taught the subject, presenting to an appropriate extent parts that were necessary or interesting with regard to art, supplementing them with detailed exercises in drawing. The anatomy display boards he made the institute with the purpose of illustrating his lectures are of high value and better than teaching aids used elsewhere for the subject. Bertalan Székely held two hours of anatomy lectures a week.' The still existing thirty-eight anatomy visual display boards also contained histological diagrams on the eyes and skin, which, as a physiological background, gave explanation to problems of painting flesh and other colour issues of painting connected to female nudes. (Cat. IV-18; IX8) Supposedly Dr Pál Plósz, who specialised in physiology and pathological chemistry, also covered the subject in his lectures, having spent the academic year of 1869/70 on a study-tour in Tübingen, Germany, in the laboratory of Hoppe-Seyler. From the academic year of 1897/98 art students visited the lectures of Dr Kálmán Tellyesniczky at the Institute of Anatomy.

174 As a teacher of anatomy and human life-studies Székely applied himself to psychology as well: on the evidence of his sketchbooks in 1875 he engaged himself with 'literature on madness', was in contact with psychiatrists and gynaecologists, and gained permission in 1878 to visit Dr Langenauer apart from the patient of Dr Thanhoffer in order to observe the mentally insane in the St Roc Hospital. His main advisor was Mór Kármán, who recommended him the majority of books on psychology, behaviourism and physical expression. Székely, who was interested in expressing the human soul through the means of painting, strove for a psychophysical founding of Le Brun and Caylus' academic subject in physiognomy and additionally studied the literature of association, mimicry, pantomime, eurhythmies, speech, physical appearance, mechanics and anatomy.

175 Among his notes references can be found to incidents that occurred in Hungary, building on the psychological drama of the hysterical female murderer, such as Erzsébet Báthori. It was the 1865 adaptation of János Arany's ballad entitled Madame Agnes that gave Székely the opportunity to portray the physiognomy of a mad woman. Neither was it by chance that it happened to be his students who later came across the subject, reproducing it in the figure of Abigél Kund (Cat. IV-5) on Jenő Gyárfás' Summons to the Corps or, as we mentioned above, István Csók's Erzsébet Bátori, who is portrayed bathing in the blood of young girls. The first draft of the latter was made during the artist's studies at the Model Drawing School.

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6 The year following the success of his educational method in 1878 in Paris, where on the occasion of the world exhibition he won the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour of France,' Székely was invited by Hans Makart, his former schoolmate from Munich, to teach life drawing and painting at the Academy of Vienna. This is what Székely himself wrote on the matter: 'Makart asked whether I would like to go to Vienna to teach and said he would be willing to prepare the ground for me. I agreed, but soon afterwards Makart