Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Imre Györgyi: A modell / The Model

The artist's independence was supported by various privileges of the academy. In its regulations (1655) the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture identifies the right to pose nude models as its own exclusive prerogative ('Sa majesté veut et entend que doresnevant il ne soit posé aucun modèle...'), and accommodated independent artists, who once and for ever detached themselves from guilds, in the rooms of the royal palace, the Louvre, as the king's equal.

1 The word académie among the tasks of the institute signified life drawings [faire une académie).

1

* (III. 4) The Hungarian and German word for nude, i

akt etymologically refers to the action of the artist posing the model for his work, following classical or Renaissance patterns.

19 It denotes therefore an action of which Poussin notes that 'Marcus Tullius calls it the language of the body and Quintilian assigns it such force and influence that he considers ideas, reasoning and emotions worthless without it, just as colours and lines.'

2

" Female nudes were portrayed by 19th-century artists as tragic heroines and the basis of their depiction

— according to Serlio's 'tragic scene', the site of special events

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—was visibility. Their iconography therefore is also founded on theories linked to vision, while the tradition of their depiction is based on the Neo-Platonist doctrine of perspective in which sunlight of metaphysical (divine) origins makes the universal order visible. It is perceived by the eye of the artist and then is crossed by the gaze of the spectator in the centre point of the picture.

22 The Venuses of Dutch art, created under Venetian inspiration, portrayed gazing into mirrors as allegories of Visus, automatically turned viewers into voyeurs. (Cat. 1-10) The ambivalent tension stemming from the sight of Venus also followed from the nature of the painting, Pictura, where the illusion of a three-dimensional image was created within the plane. The allegory of sight is interpreted as the representation of beauty and plenitude

—Voluptas

—but also that of transience

—Vanitas.

23 A good example of this is the work of Hendrick Goltzius, The Allegory of Visus and the Art of Painting (circa 1600): according to its inscription the picture is aware of its own power, which can be either pleasantly stimulating sensuality or dangerous temptation. 'I know from experience,' says the picture's inscription, 'that this harms and delights the viewers [or: those who see this].'

24 Sluijter interpreted the allegory of Sight that was enhanced with an intellectual capacity as the eye-luring Venus who (according to the iconography of both Saint Luke and Apelles) is the erudite painter's model.

2, Edgar Wind warns us that effacing the difference between fact and fiction results in the fatal restriction of artistic perception.

26 In Werner Hoffman's opinion the two different fields of Eros in the 19th century derive from the double nature of Venus: that of heaven and earth

—the level of fact, the correct anatomy of 'nudes', and the level of allegorical-mythological fiction.

27 'Beauty,' writes Schelling, 'is present anywhere where Light and Matter, Ideal and Real touch one another.'

28 The 'Humanist' artist of the 19th-century who autonomously 'draws on the tissue of raw senses'

29 and poses nude models in his studio, launched into a tentative balancing act between the two levels. His own body and œuvre became the supporting column of the see-saw: while regarding his work as a document of existence, he modelled his own artistic perception.

30 Menyhért Palágyi cautions us that 'discovering our own body is the precondition of perceiving the outer world'. 31 Bertalan Székely in his letter to Hans Makart written around 1880 says that the artist 'wants to create poetry instead of stating banal reality [...] With regards to colour / the authentic / not the colours of Marie Ott with their eventuality, with a yellow stomach and violet knees'.'

2 (Cat. IX3) By 1906, creating poetry was painting women with 'violet knees' as did members of the group of artists named The Eight who frequented the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein. (Cat. X-Í9, 22) The Model in the artist's studio The aesthetics of the Academy rested, however, on a doctrine of a characteristically metaphysical nature. The abstract notions of Truth and Progression created the conceptual forms of Beauty: 'The student,' writes Thomas B. Hess, 'did not study just any noses or toes but the perfect nose and toe'.

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' According to the schemata of classical art, instead of the action of movement the idea of movement

34 and instead of vitality the topic of vitality was what was modelled.

5

' The research of Carl Goldstein reveals that among the drawings of the Carracci: 'There is no female figure, drawn or painted by any of the Carracci, that can be said unequivocally to have been done from a live model.' Therefore Annibale's female nudes with muscular backs were modelled on the male anatomy. The various facts behind the fame are in truth topics that have been preserved by textual tradition.

36 In this context female imagery appears as the fictitious document of the artist's studio, a sensitive ground for artistic experiment. Thus all kinds of pictorial precedents played vital roles in creating the female imagery, and accordingly, classical and Renaissance erotic works became the authentic sources for the anatomy and perception of the female body. (Cat. 1-5) According to the description of Eugène Delacroix, it was David who as the sect-founding personality of the reforms of the Ecole des Beaux Arts appeared at the point when 'the paintings found at the excavations in Herculaneum prompted artists to admire and imitate antiquity.'

37 Ingres with his 'conscious epigonism' that originated from David's studio used the most varied pictorial resources from the tradition of erotic depiction for the representation of liveliness.

38 The most overtly erotic drawings preserved in his legacy are the copies of classical and Renaissance works.

39 Ingres dubbed Rafael's work as synonymous with the live nude model, and emphasised the importance of studying classical works

—because they teach one to see.

40