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

were drawn with ancient goddesses and the angelically innocent and yet devilishly seductive Eve or the modern woman, who, proclaiming the reform of the body, unhealthily disfigures with corsets her 'naturalness', similar to that of the statues of ancient goddesses. At the end of the century so-called artistic anatomies appeared in fine arts education, following the conventions of 'exotic beauty-galleries', yet at the same time presenting a medically exact depiction of the female body and placing it within a normative set of aesthetic values. This was the biologically founded ideal physical beauty

— suited to academic values as well

—featured in Dr C. H. Stratz's works entitled Der Rassenschönheit des Weibes and Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers.

111 (III. 12) Dr Mór Herczeghy in his book published in 1883 under the title The Physical and Intellectual Nature I of Women I with Special Regard to the Christian Religion, Morals and Science compares the imperfect naturalness of women to the perfection of classical statues.

133 The City Centre in the framework of Károly Lotz's female nudes 'The inner and outer decoration of the Opera House that was built beside the Avenue in 1882 according to Ybl's plans floods our painters and sculptors with a mound of tasks. [...] The crown of the commission, the centre of the auditorium, has been won by Károly Lötz. Hungarian art executed this in the course of a year for less than 30,000 forints. / Lötz was fifty when he completed his work in which our fine arts deservedly celebrated its own coming of age,' according to an article written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Opera House.

134 (Cat. VIII-10) The expression 'coming of age' can be interpreted by posterity in two different senses. Károly Lotz's al secco caseindistemper ceiling piece (1883) depicting the Olympos was the first real representative assignment in fine arts, demanding genuine technical and painterly accomplishment in the reconstructed Pest with its boulevards and avenues

—'Haussmanized' on the Parisian model. With its world of Greek gods the picture became the symbol of coming abreast with the modern times of history and universal proof of Hungarian artistic skills.

135 'We watch with full respect,' wrote an art critic, 'all movements that are directed towards creating Hungarian art, but wish first and foremost for it to be modern European.'

136 The 'coming of age' of Hungarian fine arts also signified the triumph of the genre of nudes that appeared in front of a new kind of public, due primarily to paintings becoming independent from their original murals. In this idealistic image of classical mythology Zeus, lord of the world of love and beauty, reigns over the equal standing harmony of Dionysus and Apollo. The self-portrait of Károly Lötz has been recognised by some in the face of Zeus."

7 The programme for the ceiling piece fitted into Budapest's individually structured new 'public'.

138 The Opera House designed according to so-called strict historicism was one of the first and most important public buildings in the urban reconstruction of the old capital on the central Avenue of Budapest. Typically enough, however, this new street served merely the mission of representation without fulfilling any practical functions.

139 It was for the privatised rather than the private

140 life taking place within this modern urban environment that the mythological figures of the ceiling piece of the Opera House provided a framework decoration, inside which the wealth and representation of the new 'City Centre'

—governed by a new urban elite

—ruled, while outside the 'Industrial City' continued to function with its communal set of values. Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky, intendant of the Opera House, describes in his memoirs the safety measures that gave rise to a new kind of order following the burning-down of the court theatre on the Ring of Vienna. 'The theatre's investigating committee based on the alliance of the capital and the police, hailed by me in secret, dealt with the remains of old times cruelly. [...] I was happy because I now had a clean, attractively furnished, safe and comfortable theatre

—and what's most important

—one that houses a small audience.'

141 The urban transformation of Budapest was linked to the mechanism of social reform.

143 Lotz's nudes for Olympos embodied a specific desire for beauty, eroticism and wealth,

143 conveying at the same time the modern myths of official art. Female imagery became part of city iconography. As Bertalan Székely comments in a note around 1880: prosperity 'is indicated by a woman surrounded by all kinds of rich things, which has a broader sense than placing a specific rich man there, e.g. Rothschild, as it wouldn't be so easy to deduct from his bundles of fascicles that they represent money.'

144 Although creating the image of an autonomous artistic behaviour through the academic fiction that was connected to female imagery, the serenity of the celestial company of the Olympos was in reality the work of a 'court artist'. More than half the building expenses of the Opera House, despite it being a distinctly Hungarian product, were covered by the Emperor Franz Joseph I, not from the urban construction fund, but from the representational resources of his own royal court.

145 At the ideological centre point of the ceiling picture

—which according to the explanation of the times depicted 'the household of Zeus'

—the artist placed the ensemble of Zeus and Hera, interprétable also as the imperial symbol of the ruling couple: Franz Joseph and Queen Elizabeth.

146 The female nudes and mythological figures that surround them resemble a court beauty gallery, where harmony in the form of 'amour courtois' is also present, and in it court representation 'pays its respects to the bourgeois intellect'.'

47 Károly Lötz began painting the ceiling fresco of the Opera House (1878) at the time when his career as a teacher at the academy took off at the Model Drawing School. The sketches show the debt Lötz owed to Renaissance drawings, as those made for The Realm of Death, where the female figure of Night is imitative to Michelangelo's Tomb of the Medicis.

148 (Cat. V-41) His appointment principally followed the example of the