Kostyál László: „Hirdette utcákon tereken” Németh János művei köztereken és középületekben (Zalaegerszeg, 2004)

„Professed in the streets and squares ...”

The Fishermen's monument in Vonyarcvashegy, made in 1993, commemorates a tragic event that took place in 1729, in which six of the forty-six fishermen crew from the Vashegy village within the Festetics estate lost their lives when slabs of ice crashed into their boat during a fishing trip on Lake Balaton. A votive chapel was erected on Saint Michael's Mount to honour the forty crew members who luckily escaped this tragedy by climbing onto a piece of ice. The relief was made for the mortuary under the chapel. As it was not possible to incorporate all forty fishermen into the design, only four appear. The two fishermen on the left are holding the fish-laden net tight even amid the danger; the one on the right looks horrified as he is kneeling, holding a trident and pointing to the ice dancing on the tempestuously rolling water. The forth fisherman, the central figure in the relief, is looking at us and holding his hand towards the guardian angel of fishermen descending with outstretched arms. This fisherman already sees the route of escape. High in the sky the sun is setting, and next to the sun there is a crescent moon with elks flying across it. The way Németh tells the whole story in a condensed scene is powerful. Among all of his techniques of expression, uniform composition and sequential figures play a significant role in this piece. Although the four fishermen are placed at the base of the relief, as if they were acting on a narrow stage, we can feel the depth in the scene, which is further emphasised by the raging storm in the background while the exclusivity of the profile and frontal view of the figures is ignored. The other important technique used in this composition lies in the expressiveness of the hand and head movements of the fishermen. These details help us grasp the pith of the story. A niche in the front of the former county hall in Zalaegerszeg (today it houses the county archives) provided an ideal location for The Guardian of the Zala County Crown figure, completed in 1997. This piece depicts a hussar robed in a decorative garment, riding a horse with the county arms on his horse's blanket. The figure's sculptural peculiarity is due to the unusual combination of portraying him from both the side and front. The head of the horse piaffering with its leg in profile turns towards us, as does the hussar's upper body and face. Consequentially, we might feel this work of art the inspired successor of Verocchio's imposing Colleoni statue in Venice, or of the honey-cake hussars from the marketplace. This duality was evidently the master's intention. The naive charm of the figure, the elaborateness of the dolman, the sword, and the ornaments of the arms, and the overwhelming childhood memories generated by the honey-cake, make us forget the unreality of the depiction. It does not matter that the hussar's right hand in front of the horse's neck and under its chin defies the logic of spatiality, but that hussar's hand can be seen in full. It is of no consequence either that the horseman is depicted partly from the side and partly from the front (as if it followed the characteristic law, which is the law of typical surfaces of antique Egyptian tomb paintings), but that image of the popular hussar honey-cake or its cake pan manifests before our eyes. The crown guard is not only a handsome and grim soldier, but a brilliantly formed, well-proportioned, nevertheless life-like fairy creature, whose everyday observers, partly due to the emphatic county arms, feel him especially their own. The artist's work which grew out of the cultural and artistic prosperity of the millennium year celebrating the foundation of the Hungarian State is the ornamental well in Százhalombatta (2001), a frieze depicting the legend of the "miraculous stag". The task was unusually complex, since the ceramist-sculptor and Károly Szerdahelyi, an architectural colleague, had to work in partnership to make the design fit into the context of a catholic church built with the typically organic features of Imre Makovecz that draw on ancient Hungarian symbolism. The relief has distorted proportions, and in terms of its dimensions, 17