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

playing element, one that reaches up to the present: we have arrived at the suggestive ambiguity of a peep-show scene. Albrecht Dürer, in a woodcut for his Unterweysung der Messung, 1525 (111. 8), supplies an enlightening footnote to this loss of a dimension (which also includes a gain). Here, the draughtsman regards the lying female, with her substantially revealing pose, in a severely professional manner. He makes use of a framed grid, the lines of which disassemble the body mass, thus helping him to achieve anatomical precision in his drawing of a doll-like Florentine Venus. The psychologically self-referential nature of the nude is carefully recorded. However the angle of vision of the draughtsman is distinguished from that of the viewer of the woodcut, for whom the view offered to Titian's organ player is intended. As a result, while we, the viewers, observe the woman in her voluptuous availability, the draughtsman can only capture her foreshortened body. He makes an official record, while we are at liberty to expand on the dreams, mythologies and forms of desire suggested by the body. The same nude is simultaneously a mere fact and something that is made available for the many levels of role that our imaginations can conceive.

17 Thereafter, from the beginning of the modern era, Eros is presented on two levels (relics of the double nature of Venus, heavenly and earthly): that of the clinical "nude", whose correct anatomy requires neither symbolic or literary justification, nor exaltation; and that of a mythical-allegorical fiction. It displays the nude in her Venus roles

—from the birth of Venus to depictions of her toilette, her triumph and her various partners and liaisons up to the judgement of Paris. In the centuries between Titian and David, the painters and sculptors continued with this beauty contest on their own account. Each of them, playing the part of Paris, provides ever new and vivid arguments through their works that underpin "his" (their own) taste in beauty. Venus vulgaris and the "Eternal Feminine" What happens to "heavenly and earthly love" in the 19th century? What is the role allotted to Venus? Once again let me begin with a focusing instance. The publication of Flaubert's Madame Bovary goaded the censors of the Second Empire into action. On the 31st of January, 1857, a trial began in which charges concerning the work's immorality and "irréligion" were laid before the judges. Towards the end of his address, which was liberally salted with quotations from supposedly incriminating passages, the public prosecutor, M. Pinard, delivered himself of a fundamental dictum, namely: "Art without rules is no longer art; it is like a woman who throws off all her clothes."

1S Evidently the prosecutor was still under the influence of an episode in the book, with which he had previously appealed to the erotic fantasy and potential outrage of his listeners. This was the scene where Emma "brutally" dispenses with her garments, loosens her corset and finally, in a single gesture, lets fall "all her remaining clothes" in order to throw her trembling body into the arms of Léon. For Pinard, this scene encapsulated the concept of art favoured by the accused: Flaubert knew nothing of veils, but showed Nature entire, in all her coarse nakedness. Indecent exposure, obscene and immoral nudity: this was the condemnation of elemental nakedness sought by the official judges of art at the time, and not only in the Victorian era. Justification for this view was provided by the moralists who, like the medieval clerus, saw in the naked woman the temptations of the devil. The authorities demanded that art provide a form of edification that veiled and suppressed desires, whereby ancient anxieties regarding images re-emerge. If fanaticised believers once saw themselves empowered to pull down heathen statues from their pedestals, contemporary aggression, even if it was mostly verbal, was now directed at the great exhibitions of the new art. Outraged persons ganged up in front of unloved pictures in the Paris Salon and threatened them with sticks and umbrellas. The cartoonists of the humorous magazines have recorded such scenes for us. An unconfirmed anecdote evokes this climate of the witchhunt: on a visit to the Salon in 1853, Napoleon III is said to have stopped before Courbet's Bathers (Musée Fahre, Montpellier); drawing his whip, he jabbed it in the direction of the luxurious backside of the figure with its back turned to the viewer. The scandal-hungry masochist in Courbet regretted that the jab remained in the air and did not reach its target.

19 As the main showcase for contemporary French painting and sculpture, the annual Salon reflected the ongoing conflict between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between academic painters and those who were (in the view of academic painters) "anarchists". The fact that morality and "public decency" (M. Pinard) required sterile, idealised formalism was in obvious conflict with the literature of those who sought to show "nature in her entire nakedness" (Pinard again). The conflict had reverberations for the bipolar topos of the Heavenly and Earthly Venus. Between these two camps stood a third. Its protagonists concentrated on a pleasing sensuality that sought to satisfy the bourgeois public's need for erotic pictures. To these old hands at erotic titillation a generous interpretation of moral conventions was permitted, since works that exploited the alibi of a mythological subject were beyond the reach of the censor. On the other hand, if somebody chose to paint a woodland scene with a naked woman beside two elegant gentlemen, and to entitle his picture simply "Bathing," he offended against the rules of decency. This was to be the experience of Manet with his Le déjeuner sur Vherhe, that became so famous and scandalous. It belongs to the 2,783 works, out of 5,000 submitted, that the jury of the 1863 Salon rejected. This moved Napoleon III to offer the rejected artists an alternative public venue, the "Salon des Refusés". The reactions of its visitors ranged from outrage to ridicule. Apparently in an attempt to distance himself from his rashly liberal gesture, the monarch acquired the Birth of Venus by Cabanel from the official Salon, a painting that supplied an unintended parody of the Venus coelestis. Manet's sitting nude, however, belongs in the tradition of the Venus vulgaris. The composition is the product of diverse inspiration.

20 The most spontaneous was that