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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Bacsó Béla: Képtest - testkép / Picture-body - Body-picture

Picture-body - Body-picture BELA BACSÓ The representation of the human body and the extent to which it can be represented reveal much about the relationship of a particular epoch to the living body. However well known or frequently seen, the body as the thing represented cannot be identical with what is known already; the represented body is a different mode of relationship to the body, one that exists solely in the given work. The only question is whether the figurative and disfigurative mode and relationship to the body somehow known, seen and shown will transmit the body that exists by way of the work, whether the former will sufficiently screen the latter. The represented, as Louis Marin points out,

1 comes to be in the force field of opacity and transparency, and by screening what is beyond the visible, enables the (wellknown) body to be transparent. Opacity is what opens the space for, gives room to, what has not been seen; the represented is overshadowed by what appears meaningful in its already transparent nature. A lot of things around the body can turn transparent in its dim aura. The art of an age will probably reveal most about itself when it puts on "display" its relationship to the body. In his The Aesthetic of the Ugly (Ästhetik des Hässlichen), Karl Rosenkranz asserted that the realm of the ugly, i.e. the realm of what is in any way unlike the beautiful, has the same extensions as that of sensual phenomena. The ugly, i.e. that which is unlike the beautiful, becomes manifest by necessarily entering into a relationship with the beautiful, which is eternally one. "Nature as Aristotle would put it - mixes the beautiful and the ugly randomly. The empirical reality of the mind does the same. In order to enjoy the beautiful in itself and for its own sake, the spirit must create it, and turn it into a unique world. This is how art is made."

2 Rosenkranz's Hegelian phrasing also suggests that he thinks art is a creative spirit, which, while constantly longing for unadulterated beauty, must see it come to life in a shapeless, incorrect, unsuitable form, subjected to a kind of disfiguration ("Verbildung"). At one point Rosenkranz makes an observation highly pertinent to our present analysis, claiming that obscene vulgarity, which is shameless, has nothing to do with what is improper, or even untimely. "Obscenity belongs to what is intentionally indecent. Accidental or unintentional nudity will provoke embarrassment or an awkwardly comic sense, but is not obscene. [...] No one will talk about obscenity in connection with beautiful pictures or statues which represent naked bodies in their entirety, because nature is divine, and the sexual organs are to be considered natural, God-made organs, like the mouth or the nose. Fig leaves hung on the pudendum, on the other hand, already create an obscene effect, because they direct the attention to the latter and isolate it.'" "Flesh is more beatiful than most beatiful apparel." (Diderot) "Marble kindles obscene love." (Flaubert) The question, then, is not whether the entire body can be shown, but how the fact that the body is in place there and in that particular manner can be suggested through the representation of the same body. In the 25th chapter of his Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes three modes of representation: the first seeks to show things as they are or were; the second represents things as they are said to be, i.e. as they appear; and the third shows things as they ought to be (1460b). When we consider the representation practices of various ages, we find that one of these three modes is always more dominant than the other two. And if the thing represented is man himself, it becomes especially evident that a person - a "divine being" in human form is either represented as he/she is, or is displayed as he/she is supposed to appear in a form acceptable for many, or is shown with an ideal in mind. These three, fundamentally different, modes of representation become particularly obvious when the represented body is naked, is a nude. In a lecture at the Warburg Library of seminal importance for the art historians of the circle, Ernst Cassirer distinguished eidos from eidolon, making the relation of form and image irreconcilable, on the grounds that the image is so unlike form, which strives towards ideality, unless the image is considered something that seeks to partake of ideality.

4 Quoting Plato's Philebus (51c), Cassirer claimed that neither a beautiful living body, nor its pictorial representation can lay claim to real beauty; only a solid or a plane can do so that has been constructed in accordance with strict rules and scrupulous design, because it is ideal in itself; in other words, it partakes of eidos in its bodily manifestation. The ultimate ideality of all imitation is that there is no difference between what appears and what is represented, what is shown and what is meant to be represented. The human body, however, can have no such ideality, although artists have been seeking the ideal representation of the human body, and, through it, even the perfect body itself, for so long. If formerly art history joined the search, hoping often to pinpoint the ideal representation in a single oeuvre, now its witty practitioners probe the work of the human body on itself, as a form of "artistic" activity that also aims at such an ideality. My essay title, which I borrowed from Theodor Hetzer, describes an irreversible historical movement that took place when artists no longer felt bound by abstract mathematical space in the organization of the picture and the construction of the pictorial order; consequently, the picture became an essence that had, as it were, a body of its own, with principles and rules of life that became meaningful and valid within, and only within, the picture.

5 Hetzer called this peculiar quality and construction of the picture - of general currency from the late 16th until the late 18th century - picture body ("Bildleib"). Painting in the 19th century came to grips with