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
of this requires, as a first step, an exposition of the sources of the forms in Aurora. One could begin with the Medici Venus, from the Dresden plaster copy of which Runge made a drawing in 1 801. 4 ' Where does the Aurora's upward pointing arm come from? In one of the preliminary sketches it is bent (Traeger, 382), later it is laid on the head (Traeger, 176). Behind this depiction one could imagine a wounded Amazon. i: It is more likely that Runge had deployed a formula of his own invention for evoking pathos. We are familiar with such from the Fingal of the Ossian drawings (1804-05, Traeger, 330, 334), where it already heralds a breakthrough. (The arm is entwined round a lance, the tip of which ends in a star!). This supplicatory gesture is shortly afterwards transferred to one of the Hülsenbeck Children. The way in which the little August holds up his whip is an embodiment of Runge's resolve, expressed at the end of the letter cited above, that "we must become children, if we want to achieve the best." This yearning for renewal was soon to find its light-emanating apologist in the figure of Aurora / Venus / Mary. Hanna Hohl has already drawn attention to the mingling of Christian and antique ideas in Neo-Platonism and suggests Kosegarten as a possible source: "Just as Aurora brings twofold light and life, so, according to this tradition, Venus also has a twofold presence, as Kosegarten showed in his study Über die wesentliche Schönheit ("On the Essence of Beauty", 1785-90). She is Venus Anadyomene and Venus Urania, earthly and heavenly beauty, the productive force of the material world and the pure intelligence of the spirit." 5 ' In his pictures Runge succeeded in folding these two layers into one. In the Morgen etching we look in vain for the figure of the bringer of light. Runge has concealed it at the very top of the picture, in the "morning star": "The Venus is the pistil, or the middle point of light, and to this I have deliberately given no other form than the star," he wrote to Daniel on 30.1.1803 (Hinterlassene Schriften I, 31). Later, in the painted version of Morgen, Venus acquires a human form, yet in the sepia drawing the star is still to be seen, now geometric and suffusing the whole composition with its rays. In other words, the lap of the goddess of light is the light-source from which the ruled rays emanate - star and Venus are made congruent. Thus the sex of Aurora / Venus / Mary constitutes the centre of a circle, of which the base is the lying child, and the crown the lily of light; moreover the circle dovetails with the eclipse of the sun and the crescentshaped gloria of angels —the composition expands within this framework. By means of the surface geometry, Runge constructs the vertical "membrane" of a two-dimensional vertical projection. With this he rejects the central perspective of empirical space. Not that the picture lacks depth — his "landscape" supersedes its art historical genre, since it reaches out into a cosmic space without boundaries. Venus again becomes polysemous, as she was before the great Venetians around 1500 allotted her a "monofocally " conceived role, absolutely of this world, and so represented her. Runge's figure is in many respects a paradox. Floating like an icon in a gloria of geniuses, it seems to be placed forward of the space, yet at the same time to come out of the furthest depths of this early day of creation. She is somehow removed —one cannot imagine her surrounded by adorers —and yet she is endowed with attractions of the flesh, which shows how well Runge was acquainted with the Dresden antiquities collection and its plaster casts. Nevertheless, however endowed with Aphrodite-like beauty her forms may be, the upward directed gaze is not that of a heavenly or earthly Venus, but belongs rather to a "Queen of grace". Thus the epiphany, the distant descendant of the goddess figure, also implies a heavenward floating movement. In other words, the salvatory mission of the Virgin Mary is combined with the qualities of a cosmic Venus. Runge's formal and intellectual syncretism —his "polyfocal" approach —had no successors in the 19th century, since the blending of Eros and mysticism, which later was a feature of Symbolism, cannot be derived from the Aurora. What such blending lacks are the reciprocal features between man, nature and the cosmos realised through allegory. Munch's Madonna (Liebendes Weib) may serve as an example of the changing face of Venus, the Virgin Mary and Eve. Gustave Moreau's great seducers —Salome, Helena, Messalina —may have iconic status, yet they have no relationship to events in nature. On the other hand, when Moreau enthrones the Mother of God in a "mystical flower," high above the dead martyrs, her sacral essence lacks any erotic dimension. 34 Gauguin's contribution to our theme is incomparably more complex. His Eve is discovered in a tropical garden of Eden, sporadically afflicted with remorse, then reverting to the innocent nakedness of an exotic goddess of love, a Venus naturalis. 3 " In her face, the features of the painter's mother have been discerned. The ceramic statuette of a Black Venus (1889) has insightfully been described as a "Venus-Pietà"."' The crouching figure was probably seen by Gauguin on Martinique. One of Gauguin's masks lies in her lap. Since the painter often identified himself with the Christ of the Passion, it is perhaps not far-fetched to understand Venus here as "a symbolic Pietà". Add in the lotus flowers, whose phallic stem snakes upwards, and this seductress too acquires an iconographical significance: Venus is transmuted into an Eve. More aggressively than his painter contemporaries, Emile Zola presented the split nature of Eros in his artists' novel L'Œuvre (1886) and showed how the Venus topos deconstructs into oppositional elements of "heavenly and earthly love" that are no longer reconcilable. The one stands for a rigidly stylised aestheticism, the other for "art without rules", which was the accusation levelled at Flaubert. The painter Claude Lantier works obsessively on a picture in which Christine, his mistress, with eyes full of hatred, recognizes an idol —the idol of an unknown religion. In the woman's thighs she sees the pillars of a tabernacle, the belly becomes a shining star, the sex a mystical rose and the entire nakedness is like a monstrance. Zola evokes the dazzling splendour of an artistic figure that could have originated with Moreau. Against the decorative nudity of this fiction Christine, in her furious jealousy, exploits the weapon of the Venus vulgaris. She undresses in
