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

times he left it to his interpreters to discover a Venus Anadyomene

lh in a woman depicted in the waves of the sea. All his naked creatures, sheltered by landscape, are derived from the matriarchal conception of life. In terms of intellectual history, they have their mythographical equivalent in Bachofen's contemporary research into Das Mutterrecht [Matriarchy, 1861], though of course without the latter's misogynistic subtext. Notwithstanding his engagement with social issues, Courbet did not "exploit" the image of woman in the class struggle or the sex war. For him, woman was more than a robust Venus vulgaris: she was a self-sufficient elemental force emerging from the sea, or from the springs and marshes, a force to which he abandoned himself as a painter. In the centre of his huge canvas L'Atelier (1855), representing an "allégorie réelle" of his studio, stands a nude epitomising the chaste force of nature, holding her drapery tightly to herself. She provides support for the artist without however distracting his gaze from the easel. In rendering the functional clothing of a model, Courbet is painting the female impulse for giving of herself, but without borrowing from the iconography of the inspirational muse. In the last resort, therefore, woman is for Courbet the embodiment of myth: in her lies L'Origine du Monde (III. 11), better: the origin of his, the painters world.

27 For over a century the picture in this illustration, painted for Khalil-Bey in 1866, was withheld from public view. Today it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay and does not appear to outrage anyone. With its exposure to the public, the substance of the picture loses some its sacral aura. (The indiscretion of the flâneurs profanes the notion of discretion). Yet the picture is really concerned with an idea, and not simply with the pornographic depiction of pubic hair. Courbet managed to counterbalance the exposure of "nature dans toute sa nudité" and to distance the immediacy of the gynecological detail. He essentialises the body, of which we see the basic torso without head or arms. This artistic concept creates a high degree of concentration, which the viewer perceives as an ineluctable pull of attraction

—his eye cannot avoid confrontation with the sex. And the latter is offered equally to the male or female gaze: it is nature itself, which is shown, but not interpreted

—neither a Venus coelestis, nor a Venus naturalis. Courbet's dispassionate treatment of the body corresponds in some ways to Dürer 's draughtsman (111. 8); both are recording the image with professional concentration. We know only the result of Courbet's labours. It has the unforeseen immediacy that trumps all our expectations, the immediacy of an elemental happening that enthralls the eye. The picture's title is no coy euphemism, but precisely encapsulates the twin harmonies of this icon: the accumulated power of the feminine eros, which at the same time proclaims itself as a self-perpetuating force, as that which Bachofen called the "absolute candour of the pure tellurian element yielding to its own nature."

20 If Goya, Courbet and Manet, and also (in his way) Cabanel endow the Venus topos with profane elements, they nevertheless remain within the traditional "single focus", mandatory for easel painting since the 15th century. Under this heading I include all empirically convincing, illusionistically painted renderings of the diverse aspects of the world.

29 For this purpose, the square space of the picture is treated like an "open window" (L. B. Alberti): constrained by a central perspective, it shows only what the painter perceives from a single viewpoint (thus "monofocal") and consequently only what he can reproduce from this viewpoint. A picture like the Florentine Triumph of Venus, in which a vertical projection, and not convergent lower-lying axes, controls the relationships of the figures, still belongs to the medieval "multifocal" representation. It shows, not the actuality, but an additive, constructive "pseudo-gathering"

—a concentrated symbolic image in the form of an "eternal adoration". Philipp Otto Runge lived at the northern edge of the artistic culture dominated by the "monofocal" principle. Though a Protestant, he was nevertheless not unreceptive to Mediterranean "catholicity", but saw less of the continuity than the caesuras. In February 1802 he wrote a manifestolike letter in which he sketched his position in the history of the newer way of painting.

30 Michelangelo's Last Judgement he regarded as the "border marker for history composition", and Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which could already be admired in Dresden at that time, was for him nothing more than "an emotion"; since then, "nothing in the line of history has been created, and all beautiful compositions tend towards landscape..." As an example he gives Guido Reni's Aurora (which was widely circulated in print form), but immediately begins to point out a shortcoming that he aims to remedy with his own work: "There has never been a landscape painter who had real significance in his landscapes, who inserted allegories and beautiful ideas in a landscape. Which of us does not see spirits in the clouds at the going down of the sun? Is there anyone for whom the most distinctive thoughts are not floating before their inner eye? Does not a work of art come about in the very moment when I apprehend a link with the universe?" This wishful thinking, in which artistic subjectivity is objectivised into an art historical dividing line, was concretised by Runge in his four Zeiten depictions, although of course not completely, since only one of the etchings of the four Times of the Day, made in 1803, was developed into a picture; this in turn proved only to be the preliminary version of a subsequent and more substantial treatment. The preliminary sepia drawing illustrated here (III. 12) contains linear and circular lines of construction that do not appear in the finished picture, but which are significant for our theme. In Morgen (Morning) Runge painted a polysemous answer to Reni's Aurora, without however any formal borrowing from the latter. The figure does not only represent the ancient Goddess of the Dawn: Runge has referred to her as "incipiently Aurora, incipiently Venus" (Hinterlassene Schriften I, 233), while his brother Daniel saw in her the "earthly Mary that once was", the Mary who, as "the Queen of grace soars out of the earthly night to the heavenly heights" (Hinterlassene Schriften II, 536). The polysemy of the central figure corresponds to the "polyfocus" of the picture's structure. The demonstration