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

the very lack of that which in the picture body united the natural and the ornamental, the image and the creative-projective interpretation, the illusion-making space and the plane organized by its own rules/

1 To describe the opposing condition, Bernd Growe, who to my knowledge was the first to employ this early scheme by Hetzer," suggested - apropos especially of Manet and Cézanne - picture field ("Bildfeld") as the counter-concept, which by its non-relational quality excludes every notion and relation outside the picture, creating a completely new concept of the picture, often to the point of giving up composition altogether. If we consider this change in 19th-century picture construction - the features of which now seem entirely self-evident - and its bearings on the nude, we shall arrive at the inverse of Hetzer's concept, at something that I shall call body picture; this term refers to the picture as a picture, and gives the meaning of a picture, even when it shows a body. This change is brought into sharp relief by the representation of the nude, especially when we realize that several 19th-century painters sought to avoid the self-reliance of the picture body by using "quotes" or "mythologems" that at the time already appeared as mere ornamentation or concealers, or aroused interest only by highlighting the sensual element (cf. e.g. Gustave Moreau, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Adolphe-William Bouguereau). This critical attitude is, of course, no new thing. A very clever version of this external kind of painting Phryne, 1861 (III. 1) was copied by such masters as Degas, Cézanne and Rodin. The judicious Zola, however, was not deceived. The painting shows the marble-pure body of the well-known hetaera, whose virginal quality is emphasized by her shy demeanor, and it is the faces of the judges that reveal a less-than-pure effect. Gombrich, with a cynicism befitting Zola, formulates Gérôme's possible defense:

8 such pictures, the painter is assumed to say, may outdo even the paintings of Raphael in their historical authenticity or their accurate representation of apparel. Yet, as Gombrich points out, perverting the tools for unworthy causes, and corrupting art for a sensational and sensual effect had long been contested. When, for instance, Giovanni Pietro Bellori says, in his lecture The Idea of the Artist, that Caravaggio's naturalistic painting is mistaken in not representing humans as they should be, he anticipates the kind of ideality of art representing humans that would later lead to frivolous and scenic vacuity. Bellori was the first priest of the Raphael cult that would return, in a clichéd and sometimes blasphemous guise, at the beginning of the 19th century/ Bellori quoted the Triumph of Galathea (III. 2),

U) whose female figure was supposed to represent an ideal, as a picture surpassing the limitations of naturalistic representation, and encouraged artists to go back to antique models, so that what is divine in them could check the merely sensual effect. Almost a hundred years later, Winckelmann repeated Bellori's recommendation, claiming that nature alone cannot create a completely beautiful body, and like bees, artists must gather what is beautiful, or must, like gardeners, graft specimens that are not perfect in themselves to produce nobler scions. Winckelmann emphasizes that a creator can achieve this goal when he is void of personal inclinations, when he steps beyond the material.

11 When Bellori suggested that creators resort to imagination to avoid the dangers of being lost in the merely visible, a corollary of imitation, he was as good as saying that it is imagination that provides artists with the room necessary to formulate the relationship of the visible with the invisible. Winckelmann emphasized recreation according to antique models, "grafting" and its normative value. Diderot and Lessing no longer wrote about the copying of antique models only, and in Laokoón the latter almost solves the problem that arose in connection with Gérôme's picture, claiming "a single yearning look makes the noblest face ridiculous, an old man manifesting youthful desires is loathsome as an object of art."

12 Ingeniously, Lessing points out the same anthropological foundation we seek to identify in visual representations today. The question in truth is what both authors ask: how to give back the vitality of the body} Diderot, a foe of all contemporary and future academism and historicism (he favored Chardin and La Tour!), claims that choosing between Caravaggio and Poussin, as later between Delacroix and Ingres, was injurious because the real question is what can be represented, and how it can be done. This is why his claim that Chardin is able to paint flesh, while Boucher is a mere dauber of buttocks and breasts is so important." I disagree with Michael Baxandall,

14 who claims that Diderot did not acknowledge the clarity and sensibility of vision, as everything Diderot says in his writing on painting or his "salon piece" on Chardin's still-life gives voice to the same demand Baxandall calls, after the 18th-century tradition, "distinctness of vision." Diderot's principle is to show as much as the eye can take in, which refers exactly to what Baxandall calls adaptation and routine through the use of vision, i.e. the distinctness of vision. Diderot calls for the making of things visible by means of the visible, so that we can see more than meets the eye. Diderot's critique concerned painting engaged in the mere presentation of suffering ("butchery"!), in empty theatricality (Watteau), in an adaptation of models that destroys or saps them, in the mixing of the allegorical and the realistic (Rubens); which is to say he knew that only artists creating by the rules of vision and visibility can avoid these mistakes and allow flesh to radiate on the body - to make the represented animated. As Diderot points out at the end of his piece, this animation cannot but remain skin-deep, or, as Deleuze, himself a devotee of Diderot, put it, epidermic. The nude and its modern renderings either become wonderful instances of this very superficiality, of what produces the surface: the skin; become, that is, cases of the represented body - or turn into non-artistic objects of the self-betraying enchantment that provokes desire and excitement. The nude - this extreme and hazardous point of imitation - is either able to represent something in its naked truth, reveal, that is, something about a person as an uncovered being, or else it serves other purposes. In a recent essay, Gottfried Boehm looks at the topos of vitality in painterly representation, and points out that based on the energeia concept of