Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 24. (Budapest, 2006)

Magdolna LICHNER: The reception of electroplates in Hungary I. - Electroplates in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts 1873-1884

tion: he knew Gustave Doré's illustrations

50 and the same works inspired Morel-Ladeuil.

M It is quite possible that the model of an illustration made by Mihály Zichy to Imre Madách

's The Tragedy of Man depicting the Paradise scene (Picture 8.) and the round embossment in the centre of the Milton Shield (Picture 6.) was an illustration made by Gustav Doré to the 1866 London edition. English craftsmen prepared clichés from Doré's drawings. Therefore it is highly probable that Morel-Ladeuil got to know the drawings before the book was published, so much the more as the highly sculptural work and the richly decorated book were finished at the same time.

52 Most probably, it was the coincidence of the 200"

1 anniversary of the first edition and the Paris world exhibition that motivated Elkington. The publication of Milton's Paradise Lost was a part of a business enterprise, the socalled World Library, which extended to several countries. The blocks were used for several editions (published in various languages); the 50 pages of pictures were printed in Leipzig, where the German edition was prepared. The New York edition was published simultaneously with the London edition; then the Dutch translation in Leyden, the Italian one in Milan and finally the Russian one in St. Petersburg.

5

' Just as Shakespeare's work strongly influenced the national identity of the English, so did Milton's oeuvre become an organic part of it. Their cult was canonized in the 18th century. Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, an attempt to establish English historical painting, was an unsuccessful enterprise from the business standpoint.

54 A decade later, the Johann Heinrich Füssli's Milton Gallery was published in London; yet its conception was completely different. In several halls of the building of the Academy (situated in the Pall Mall, not far from the Shakespeare Gallery [opened in 1790]) illustrations made to Milton's poems were exhibited from 1799. In 1802, the public could see Füssli's further works made to Paradise Lost. The engravings made on the model of the paintings (exhibited in the Milton Gallery) were published by the Vernor, Hood & Sharp, and Poultry in 1808.

55 Füssli's attitude was influenced by the Milton debate, which unfolded subsequent to Johann Jakob Bodmer's German translation, then by the Sturm und Drang, that is, the attitude and aesthetical standards of the representatives of German Romanticism. For Füssli, Lucifer, the Satan was a heroic individual with a symbolic fate. The parallels of this notion can be found in Blake's and Byron's poems rather than in historical painting. Füssli's attempt to give a visual representation of English epic was acknowledged in narrow circles. Shakespeare and Milton became a part of the culture of the middle class; their cults became popularized. After some attempts made to produce a visual representation of literary cults, the Doré illustrations created the popular and still effective visual world of English and European literature (Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais and others). Owing to the historical works of Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the period of the Civil War and the personality of Cromwell drew general attention to the period of English Protestantism and of the evolution of a civil state and a nation.

56 Bunyan was Milton's contemporary; however, his allegorical novel was a popular book in the strict sense of the word and rose into the middle-class culture from the Quaker culture of lower classes. Both works describe man's fight for salvation albeit in highly different literary genres. In the 19"

1 century, the depiction of this universal fight coincided with the religious demands of the "Young England", that is, the aspiration to reform the Anglican Church. Thomas Carlyle's writings on literature and history, his essay on Goethe's Faust and his translations expressed his conservative Protestantism, his anti-capitalist views and his Romantic hero-worship alike. The huge success of the Doré Bible and the popularity of the Doré Gallery (New Bond Street) are related facts; the Gallery exhibited Doré's religious paintings. In 1872 Blanschard Jerrold's reportage entitled 'London. A Pilgrimage' was published. It contained 180 xylographs made on the model of Doré's staggering drawings of the city's darkest places, the poor and the rich, and, among others, served as illustrations to