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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Werner Hofmann: Venus ég és föld között / Venus between Heaven and Earth

Venus between Heaven and Earth WERNER HOFMANN For an essay aiming at concise treatment of a many-layered theme, a convincing point of departure is offered in the pellucid concentration of a motif, one that both anticipates the essay's content {or "focuses" it, in modern parlance), and simultaneously reveals the latter's potential implications. Such an inspiration for my theme occurs in the thirty-second Canto of the Paradiso in Dante's Divine Comedy, at the heart of which is the glorification of the Virgin Mary. Right at the beginning of the Canto, the mother of Jesus, honoured above all other women, is presented as victorious over her adversary, the ur-mother of mankind. For Saint Bernhard, the "eyes" of Dante, the scene suggests the typological opposition between Eve and Mary, a coupling of contrasts. At the feet of the Virgin, who clearly is to be envisaged as standing, lies the beautiful Eve, "quella ch' è tanto bella" (whose name however is not mentioned). The latter's sin of disobedience is also only alluded to with a discreet metaphor: we are told it was she who had opened the wound

—for which read: the original sin

—that Mary subsequently healed: "ha piaga che Maria richiuse e unse, quella ch' è tanto bella da' suoi piedi è colei che V aper sa e que la punse." The victor stands, the defeated lies - a conventional enough pairing, which emblematizes the two exemplary roles. The physical beauty of the seductress, who was herself seduced by the serpent, stands for sinfulness, which all mankind, unredeemed, must bear up to the moment when Mary receives the Annunciation; subsequently the power of the Virgin's spirituality purifies and saves, thus restoring the lost Paradise: "De paradis nous fut la porte close Par le default d'Eve Et par Marie La barrière de Paradis ouverte" This four-line verse was discovered by Louis Réau in the stained glass window of a village church in France.

1 From the point of view of the Christian teaching of salvation, Eve's forbidden eating of the apple was an act with grave consequences; yet the sinner was disallowed from enjoying the emancipatory results of her disobedience, for that was something which lay beyond the redemptive province of Christianity. (It was Max Klinger who was the first to offer a meditation, in a visual medium, on Eve and the Future). This circumstance necessarily narrows the spectrum of Eve's iconography. Since she and Mary could not appear as opponents on the same level (which would suggest a "revaluation" of original sin), any departure from the rule is a cause for surprise; for example, a virtually equal presentation of the two women such as we find in the missal of the Salzburg Archbishop, Bernhard von Rohr.

2 (7//. 1) This depiction shows Eve and Mary not in dialogue, but engaged in parallel and analogous activities. Accordingly the two halves of the tree of life and of knowledge are given equal weight at the centre of the page. They thus fulfill opposed expectations and needs. On the right-hand side stands Eve, helping herself to apples, that she plucks from the sinful side of the tree, in which a death's-head is seen to be lurking. On the other half of the tree may be seen the Eucharistie host, which Mary is distributing to the faithful. The viewer is to decide between the bringer of salvation and the bringer of sin. The latter seduces with false promises, which will assist Death (who appears in the background) to his domination, while the former opens the way to eternal life for believers.' Eve displays her body completely uncovered, the artist evidently being unaware of the convention of the Venus Pudica, which Botticelli followed for his exactly contemporaneous Birth of Venus. That was painted in 1482, the illumination for the Salzburg Missal one year earlier. Or did perhaps the book painter (by agreement with his commissioner?) believe that only the brazenly represented and dazzling beauty of Eve could serve to highlight the spiritual superiority of the Virgin Mary? Anyone looking at the work will nonetheless perceive more that pleases the eye in Eve/Venus figure than in her rival. It must be conceded that this observation is hardly original, namely that Eve and Mary, Venus and Salome, Helen and Medusa, are all projections of male fantasy, mixing wishful dreams with anxiety, desire with defensive reactions. To the male eye, the "eternal woman" can be spread over different roles, defined by others or by herself, as willing object or self-willed subject. Such distinctions occur arbitrarily to the man, who at one moment seeks to make the woman subordinate to his physical desire, and at another elevates her to an ideal. These respective roles are distinguished in the formal differentiation that Dante contrives in the vision of St Bernhard: Mary stands, Eve lies at her feet. If man wants sexual domination of the other sex and wishes to have artists or sculptors realise this desire in effigie, he prefers to place the woman in a lying position of passive availability.

4 If he is seeking in woman an idealised figure, one he can look up to, he grants her the position of dominance (standing or enthroned). In the Salzburg Missal Eve is an autonomously acting person, from which it follows that she is of equal rank as Mary and, like her, the object of collective veneration. From this can be deduced a basic rule of thumb: lying figures evoke an expectation of erotic surrender, standing