Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

III. RÉSZ: A KONFERENCIA SAJTÓVISSZHANGJA

(Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)," caricatures dating back to 1812 presented an academic, though naive look, not traditional in essence. Nevertheless, analysis showed their continuity within visual culture together with social shifts among the authors and users of the images. Ending in 1814, the production can be seen as influencing the new quintessence of popular imagery in the nineteenth century, sentimental rather than humorous, and sharing the peasants' folklore rather than expressing it. Comparing it to traditional types of folk art as well as to Western iconographv, primarily British, Peltzer gave her own original interpretation of these Russian pictures. In her opinion, the authors created their visual images by idealizing Russian peasants, presenting them as a "symbol of moral values," and by contraposing them to the "shameless" foreign invader. This ideal was buttressed with historic trustworthiness by quotations from the papers of that time. In general, the speaker managed to convincingly show the assertion of the national image of the noble peasant and the preservation of traditional satirical symbols for conquerors. The report by T. Voronina (USSR) entitled, "Place and Functions of Lubok in the System of the Nineteenth Century Russian Folk Culture," was a logical continuation of the previous paper. The author dwelt on the causes which conditioned the themes of lubok (Russian popular pictures) from the 1820s through the 1860s, and on peculiarities of their existence in rural and urban media. Voronina stressed the importance of the historic and ethnographic aspect of research into the problem, which would enable us to reveal in a more precise manner the role of pictures in the life of society, its social conditionality and orientation. Such an approach presupposes the determination of the interactive nature between prints and other spheres of culture (folklore, folk and professional art, etc.), which as a whole made up the ethnic specificity of the popular Russian prints. Researchers' interest in lubok is not fortuitous: it is caused by considerable similarity of this country's materials with West European iconography. This fact prompted several publications abroad and ongoing discussions in recent years, especially following the retrospective exhibitions of lubok in many European countries. A group of other presentations evaluated professional level pictures, for example, in "French Popular Prints as a Key for Pictures," C. Pieske (FRG), examined three popular sheets discovered in an 1855 oil painting by J. Borsos. Popular prints were widespread in Europe and ranged from artistic lithography adapted as a framed picture through very crude broadsheets for the lower classes. Hungarian ethnologists J. Tuskes and E. Knapp paid attention to a series of illustrations from baroque period books of miracles. They concluded that these engravings were closely connected with other iconographie, narrative, and custom manifestations of the pilgrimages. The characteristics of production, distribution, and consumption of the illustrations make it possible to analyze the relation between text and picture, the formal and motive peculiarities, and the structure of the imagery. The visual narrative theology, as the authors discovered, allows us to study the internationalism of the genre, the consistent application of the universal pictorial language and the process to give up this language, the modernization of the pictures as well as the rise of technical and iconographical versions.