Nagy Ildikó szerk.: Nagybánya művészete, Kiállítás a nagybányai művésztelep alapításának 100. évfordulója alkalmából (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 1996/1)

Sinkó Katalin: Az alapítók biblikus képei és a századvég antihistorizmusa

place in Nagybánya. Lyka himself was a follower of Taine's milieu theory, and in presenting the stylistic change brought about by the Nagybánya landscape he meant to provide evidence in support of that theory. The declarations of the artists and the memoirs of their contemporaries clearly show that it was the artists' broader world view and philosophical questions, rather than their religious convictions, which lay behind their frequent depiction of religious themes. Of all the Nagybánya artists, Ferenczy dedicated the greatest part of his oeuvre to Biblical themes. He experimented with such themes already in his earliest works. He painted a Good Samaritan in Paris in 1889, followed in 1892 by his version of the Return of the Prodigal Son. Then came the Adoration of the Magi in 1895 and the Mount Sermon in 1896-1897. Nevertheless, we cannot draw the conclusion that Ferenczy was attracted to Biblical themes as a result of his religious sentiments, since both of his sons have firmly stated that he was indifferent to established religions. With regard to the oeuvre of Nagybánya artists, the discrepancy between the realized artistic programme - the long list of Biblical paintings - and the artist's comments on the subject of religion, as reconstructed from the memoirs of contemporaries and the artist's correspondence, is nowhere as great as it is in Ferenczy's case. The modern artists, including Ferenczy and the other founding members of the Nagybánya colony, just as the modern artists working in Munich or Paris, tried to provide a secularized interpretation of religious motifs through the novel presentation of the themes. Since the Biblical paintings of the Nagybánya artists were made in an age characterized by the crisis of religious art, the relevant background from the history of ideas should be sketched out first. The ongoing erosion of religious feeling and phylosophical certainty contributed to this crisis, as did the renewal of the artistic styles. THE CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS PAINTING BETWEEN 1870 AND 1900 Most of the different views on the decline of religious art as summed up by Adolf Smitmans presupposed the existence of a special "Christian art." However, in specifying the characteristics of this "Christian art," the differences between religious denominations also played a part. Historically and dogmatically, the different expectations of the various religious denominations towards art have been based on the Catholic cult of images on the one hand, and on the Protestant opposition to such cultic pictures on the other hand. In this respect, Werner Hofmann's study entitled Geburt der Moderne aus dem Geist der Religion ("The Birth of Modernity from the Spirit of Religion") should be mentioned, in which the author attaches crucial importance to Luther's role in the spread of autonomous art in Europe. Hofmann quotes from one of Luther's sermons, in which he said that "the picture is neither of this kind nor of that; in other words, it is neither good nor bad; the choice whether to own it or to reject it is man's." Hofmann adds the following to this: "The age of modernity began with this letter of liberation." Other authors also regarded the new situation brought on by the Reformation as a fundamental turning point in the history of art. Hans Belting goes as far as to draw a distinction between "the age of pictures," in which the emphasis is on the cultic pictures, and "the age of art." "Instead of allowing themselves to be reduced to pure metaphors, the old pictures meant to provide direct evidence for both perception and intellect... This was replaced by art... The crisis of the old picture and the emergence of the new artistic character mutually presuppose one another. Aesthetic mediation leads to different possibilities for the application of pictures." According to Belting, this process also took place in Catholicism back in the seventeenth century, when the above-mentioned transformation of pictures took place. "The Catholic Church had to find a new application for pictures in order to be able to maintain its demands in connection with cultic pictures in 'the age of art'," Belting claims. Since the Council of Trent the Catholic Church has been consistent in referring to objects placed in churches as "sacred art" in its bulletins. The different conceptions of pictures in Catholic and Protestant dogma have been based on the relationship between art and sacrality ever since Luther and the Council of Trent. In many respects, nineteenth-century attempts to renew religious painting also reflected the various approaches of the religious denominations. Among the gravest of all the European crises in the second half of the century was the antagonism between the liberal states and the churches. This antagonism led to an increase both in religious confessionalism and in the centralism of the Catholic Church. To counter the spread of liberal ideas, Pope Pius IX issued in 1864 a collection of modern fallacies under the title "Syllabus", which named the false teachings of the age. These fallacies included naturalism, pantheism and rationalism. "Syllabus" was but one episode in the continuing struggle between the Church and a nineteenthcentury society moving towards nationalism and secularization, which eventually ended in the Church's loss of political power (September 20, 1870). In Germany, Bismarck launched the "Kulturkampf" (1872-1879), while in France decrees regulating the Church were introduced (1879-1885, 1890 - the dissolution of some of the monasteries and monastic orders, the introduction of state-run public schools). The process of separating Church and State and introducing Church autonomy was accompanied by heated debates in Hungary, as well. In his work discussing both the theories published on religious painting after 1870 and the critical responses they generated, Adolf Smitmans focused on a number of areas in which the views came to be divided along the lines of religious denomination and aesthetic conviction. One of these areas was the definition