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

ancient rhetoric, the point was always to achieve a vivid effect, which brings to life, through the representation and the represented, a kind of différence in relation to the assumed immediacy of life." According to this scheme, a nude painting is not the representation of a naked person in the picture; instead the represented figure resembling a naked body enters into a relationship with how we know the body as our own. This mode, definite and to be understood in its meaning, is how the picture establishes a relationship with what a human being is when naked. It is probably worth noting that we hardly exist naked, and when we do, we see ourselves in a mirror or as exposed to the look of another. Nude painting readily employed, even in the phase of body picture, the passionate moment of exposure, the figure's revelation before itself and, indirectly, before others (another figure or the viewer). Standing before the mirror, or appearing in it, is a multifaceted attempt to become one with the one thus seen/shown, or else to become completely detached from oneself, to be in a complete loss of the self-object and to surrender to this change brought about by the look of the other (as oneself). Which Sartre would describe as the fact that the other is and can be (facticity), the fact, in other words, that my contingent bond with the other is an objective being in the world. Distanced by the look, one shows oneself as another. The Venus pictures of Velázquez (The Toilet of Venus [a.k.a. the Rokeby Verms] III. 3) and Rubens (The Toilet of Venus or Venus at the Mirror, III. 4) can be interpreted in this light, as both artists employed this dual effect: the powerful sight of the body for the viewer and the "investigative" look the figure directs at the viewer. Hetzer

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1 is right to claim that Rubens's Venus is lively, animated and multi-layered; while Titian arranges the details of the body into the picture as a whole, the body in Rubens assumes a life of its own, and this vitality I liveliness does not surrender the body to the lustful and sensuous look, but maintains the former in its intelligible self-giving. Titian's Venus is unapproachable. Like a person looking at himself/herself, the figure appearing in the picture creates a lively and meaningful relationship with its viewer, which is to say that the body shown is - in the case of art - the revelation of the condition of the body in its relation to the viewer. As Sartre accurately phrased it,

17 the other is present in the situation as a body, which is to say that the body of the other in its flesh-and-blood reality is a given as the center of relations in a situation. There is nothing to cover the nude - unless it is she herself -, or as Sartre put it, the flesh is in the contingency of presence. This becomes very apparent in the important artists of the 19th century (Goya, Manet, Cézanne); the situation of the represented figure as a body shows a relationship that cannot be directly experienced and that is expressed by the situatedness of what can be seen in the picture. "Only through the picture does the represented become present: what it is, and what it can be."

ls The picture is not the body itself, but, through the re-presented thus shown, it refers to what the body is for the viewer through that which is thus re-presented. In his David to Delacroix, Walter Friedlaender cautions against the widely practiced extension of what is called the spirit of the Enlightenment to the whole of the 18th century. 19 The second half of the century was dominated by such painters as Watteau and Boucher, who no longer felt bound by the rigor of composition and the need to represent important events, whose mode of expression was impassive and who did without the ethical rigorousness typical of Poussin. Friedlaender considers classicist art appearing at the end of the century to be a kind of neo-Poussinism, which again drew its ethical values from antiquity; this ethical classicism, however, was political in character, and not by chance: it used the classicistic form precisely for the purposes of the revolution. At the same time, peinture galante did not sever links with antiquity: in an interesting reading of the Cythère pictures, Jutta Held claims that Watteau's paintings are late versions of the Venus festivities, the representations of happy and abandoned social existence, an almost Utopian scene where gallant inclinations, rather than unbridled lust, are served.

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" "The body in Watteau is never pure physis, but is enspirited in all respects. [...] The vibrations of the soul are socially determined, are determined not solely by the individual but by his or her relationship to the world around him or her."

21 The change and transformation that took place in 19thcentury painting, on the other hand, has all the semblance of a crisis, a fundamental divergence. Theodor Hetzer foresaw the entire period in his seminal work, and was to be confirmed by Baudelaire's worship of Goya, or Manet's early "hispanicizing" painting: "What we can never fail to acknowledge in Goya and his paintings is the power and vitality, the decisive ability to see man in a completely new way. It is very noteworthy that two things that had been quite inseparable until 1800, are now parting. The Renaissance and the age founded upon it had lively and powerful ties with beauty and the classic form; now we have, on the one hand, the pallid, smooth and frozen beauty of classicism, and on the other, the naked, drastic and ugly side of life. This latter is the most powerful and positive value of the 19th century, something Goya resorts to. All of which has reached the point where we find beauty suspicious, because often it meant nothing more than mawkish and kitschy representation. Goya in effect broke with all antiquating rhythm, harmony and contour in the representation of the body. Nothing remained in him of the academic painter, he was not deterred by the ugly and the revolting, but sought them instead."

22 Hetzer's discussion of Goya touches on almost everything of importance, and his interpretation of The Naked Maja (III. 5) is quite pertinent to our present analysis. In the mode of representation employed by this great artist, who withstood the temptation of classicism, Hetzer identifies the change defining the entire period to follow, and calls it the destruction of the tradition of the picture, followed by a way of painting where the figures are standing before a backdrop of nothing, thrown into nothing, where the body and the natural are made radically worldly, where the banality of the celestial is pushed to a point where the angels in the murals of the San Antonio de la