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

principle of beauty and unity.

194 He set Leda and the swan in

—from the artist's point of view

—the geometrically uniform space of the picture.

195 The main motif of the work can be considered the same painterly notion, termed by Székely himself in connection with the romantic allegory of Nocturne as "Liebe als Motiv'.

196 (Cat. VIII-3) Székely interpreted the categories of Aristotle in keeping with Alberti's Delia Pittura, according to which the viewer senses the action together with the artist: Tnterviene da natura, quale nulla più che lei si truova rapace di cose a sé simile, che piagniamo con chi piange, e ridiamo con chi ride, e doglianci con chi si duole. Ma questi movimenti d'animo si conoscono dai movimenti del corpo."

97 Székely converted the action into perception by means of the 'compassion' of the spectator and similarly to the researches of the time in natural science accepted nature and art as two integrated systems.

198 He made artistic 'impression' the function of artistic experience and knowledge, correlating studio work with certain methods of natural science, perception with the rules of optics and psychology and pictorial forms with physiological (histological and psychophysical) references. With his compositional method referring to physiological analysis the artist differentiated the ('conscious') 'characters' 'detached from each other', and on the basis of their internal affinity set them within a harmonious unit. In this process the spontaneity of the spectacle and inspiration and the empirical and acquired knowledge gained metaphysical significance through the personality of the artist. 'What is the source of all artistic activity? The human ability on the strength of which one must react to the impressions amassed in one's imagination formulates this reaction and gives expression to it.""

9 Artistic impression is what can become the element of pictorial construction. 'An artistic impression is such that it can be framed into a forthcoming artistic work like a building stone

—as a form, the base of light and shadow, a patch or the manner of applying colour which changes with the task and gains value not only on account of its appearance in nature but also on the strength of the laws and intentions of the picture...'

200 Székely examined Leda in the artificial surroundings of the studio, where 'the body appeared as a geometrical object'.

201 He handled 'female nature' as an abstraction of scientific scope: dissembling the drafted body, he studied individually the geometric principle manifested in it, together with its colour and matter on the basis of the effect of light.

202 Székely employed the separation and layer-by-layer division of opposing elements on the level of scientific analysis, calling it decomposing.

203 He talks of the various layers of oil paints and the skin

—of the ideal Leda and the ideal colour of flesh. 'The quality of beautiful flesh is stratification, an impact of greyness, division, warmth, softness, light and a dull surface [...] It is also influenced by temperature [...] In the cold the blood retreats from the surface blood vessels because the cold contracts the capillary vessels. Its colour becomes greenish or bluish. In the heat, on the other hand, the capillaries are filled with blood and the flesh assumes an extreme red colour. / The human flesh is a complex and aesthetically valuable matter.'

204 In another commentary written for a study on nudes Székely handles the future work of art virtually as a Gnostic object. 'Such exercises with figures further the treatment in accordance with our mental objectives.'

205 'To draw,' he wrote in 1897, 'means to aesthetically] handle bodies of geometrical shapes determined by the truths of natural science.'

206 Székely searched for parallels for his own activity: he noted of Emile Zola, for example, that he considered the experimental physiological method of Claude Bernard his own artistic method.

207 Székely analysed the interaction of colours on a physiological basis too. The most important methodological source for him was Charles Lock Eastlake's book entitled Materials for the History of Oil Painting.

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"* In his notes he modelled the partition of certain layers of glaze and in his sketchbook recorded the names of Thomas Young (1773-1829) English doctor and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) Scottish physicist according to the colour theory of whom colours mingle optically in our eyes, illustrated by Maxwell's colour disk.

209 Székely sketched a colour chart beside the drawing of his 'celestial' Leda, entitled 'Complementary Colours as Projected by Eötvös' on one of the last pages of his 13th Sketchbook. Next to it he noted in pencil: 'due to the blue sky it shall have a local colour of violet.' (Cat. IX-2) In 1872 the painter made note of the title of Michel-Eugène Chevreul's book written on the rules of colour contrasts and in 1886 and 1888 produced diagram and score-like colour tables in order to model the colour layers of his work in progress. (Cat. IX-3-4) Supposedly they too follow the method of Hermann Helmholtz's 1867 Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (The Handbook of Physiological Optics) on the perception of sight, contrasts, irradiation and the content and intensity of the sensing of light.

210 (III. 15-16) It was also a technique of natural science that directed Bertalan Székely towards experimenting with pictures. He stated that 'the artistic sight is a fluctuating sight' because it simultaneously sees the 'essential' detaching itself with 'consciousness' from the indifferent, and is therefore capable of differentiation. Székely perceived the picture field as an optical system whose harmonious unity

— according to the concept following from the genre

—has been realised by the charging of components in the series of degrees linked to each other. 'With pictures painted in good rhythm the main thing is sacrificed to secondary truths and they to tertiary ones; in a certain, regulated manner there is harmony...'

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" He also describes glasses through the two lenses of which the artist can see two types of compact movement at once, as if they were two interposed images. Fluctuating artistic vision was given expression in the unity of work based on a fluctuating motion. This was the time of the discovery of filming.

212 Through the acknowledgement of the theoretical optics of Helmholtz, and the physiological perception of