Buzási Enikő szerk.: In Europe' Princely Courts, Ádám Mányoki, Actors and venues of a portraitist's career (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2003/1)

Enikő Buzási: ÁDÁM MÁNYOKI (1673-1757) Conclusions from a Monograph

Apart from the commissions by Augustus II, the other great and important commissions came from the ducal family of Anhalt-Dessau: portraits of Leopold, duke of Anhalt-Dessau and his wife, the latter being enlarged from a waist-length portrait to knee-length in the mid18

th century, as well as portraits of the duke's four sons, some of which are not presently located.

21 (cat. nos. 38, 39). One of them, the portrait of the youngest son, Friedrich Heinrich Eugen, is perhaps the most peculiar piece of the whole Mányoki oeuvre (cat. no. 40). It is an allegorical portrait, unique among his known works thus far, not only in terms of genre but also iconography, while at the same time its stylistic eclecticism summarises his painterly knowledge variously acquired. The young duke, pictured with an old man, is wearing ornate garments including the important accessory of a beret with feather, the allegorical expression of imagination, intellect and good memory in the language of 17

th-century Dutch portraiture. Added to that is a book, an architectural drawing, compasses and an angle gauge, which suggest that the portrait is an allegory of education addressed to a certain person. This idea is also confirmed by the other figure in the picture, or by their joint representation, which is a rarely shown scene from the Old Testament: the priest Eli teaching the child Samuel. The picture is a unique combination in Mányoki's lifework of Dutch-style historicising and, especially with respect to its painterly solution, of the representative portrait. After he was appointed court painter, he received an increasing number of commissions in Leipzig to portray the professors of the university, and the well-to-do burghers and merchants and their family members. His earliest Leipzig works survive in the Kramermeister series, a set of portraits of the town's commercial body, which had been growing for many generations. His portraits painted upon family commission are only known from engravings, with the exception of the portraits of Peter Hohmann and his wife (cat. no. 57). Most of the engravings of three-quarter length figures in representative settings were made by Martin Bernigeroth and his son, Johann Martin Bernigeroth (cat. nos. 53-56). Earlier literature on Mányoki assumed that the engravings were in every respect faithful representations of the painter's invention, hypothesising that the originals also showed three-quarter figures in similarly sumptuous settings. In fact, they were busts or at most half-length portraits, which the engravers enlarged in a representative manner, drawing on the compositions, interiors and gestures of the portraits of Rigaud and Largillière. It was not Mányoki but the engravers reproducing his works who turned to other prototypes. The inspirational influence of the Leipzig-based Bernigeroth's engraved portraits of varied composition and the French models they transmitted can also be detected in Mányoki's works painted around that time. Some of his works suggest that he tried to veer away from the usual frontal busts, a format that had until then severely restricted composition in his paintings. In the years around 1720 he made several pictures in which the movement of the model was more natural and free, the body moved in space, the cut became larger, and sometimes even the hand appeared with some suggestive gesture. An example, in addition to some lost or unlocated works, is the portrait of a nobleman in armour in the National Museum in Krakow, which made use of an oft-repeated movement topos by Rigaud (cat. no. 46). The posture, the hand on the hip, the contrary motion of the trunk turning in space and the head looking back, which cannot be found in earlier Mányoki pictures, were also repeated in some portraits of narrower scope, such as the subtly executed Nostitz portrait in the Town Museum of Bautzen (cat. no. 49). The most accurate adoption of the Largillière compositions can be studied in the portrait of Count Georg Wilhelm Werthern, painted in 1719 (cat. no. 47). Two of the French painter's portraits can be considered as models: one is the three-quarter figure depiction of the heir Frederick Augustus II (later Augustus III) painted during his visit to Paris in 1715 (London, Heim Gallery); the other is the bust of chamberlain Montargu in the royal collection of Dresden since 1778. However, owing to gaps in collection history, the conspicuous kinship between the pictures cannot be explained convincingly. The occasional jobs performed in Leipzig cannot be viewed as a sort of retreat, a deliberate withdrawal from the art scene of Dresden, as Lázár had presumed. The continual cultural and artistic contact between the two towns and the identical artistic demand of the clientele ensured the interest of the upper social strata of the burgher town in the work of the Saxon ruler's court painter. However, the bourgeois features of his approach to portraiture were strengthened during the alternating work periods in Dresden and Leipzig. The extent of this change is illustrated by two portraits of a strongly similar approach - one of Countess Dönhoff, the mistress of the Saxon monarch, and the other of Charlotte Friderica Zeumer, wife of a Saxon court councillor and official of Thuringia - both dated around 1718. The years around 1720 mark the apogee of Mányoki's artistic career with continuous and varied commissions and an output of uniformly high artistic merit. This balanced production was interrupted when he returned to Hungary in 1724, intent on getting back his family estates and settling at home. Several mistaken assumptions are still prevalent concerning his return, many originating from Lázár. One is that his absence was permitted by Augustus II upon a condition: he had to make the portraits of Charles VI and his family, relatives of the Saxon ruler, in Vienna. This assumption was based on the two portraits painted, as the signature says, by Mányoki in Vienna in 1723, of the infant Maria Theresa and her