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

Florida (Madrid) look like "movie stars." Hetzer makes an important point about the changes taking place throughout the ages in the representation of the nude: Christian art, says Hetzer, including the art of the Renaissance, had no culture of the body ("Körperkultur"), and so its nudes should not be compared with the nudes of antiquity.

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' "In the Renaissance the naked person was represented with reverence and enhanced significance, shown under all circumstances as beautiful. The human being was the most perfect instance of creation, the highest form of organic life."

24 We must accept Hetzer's conclusion, namely that what came to be represented was always naked man himself, even if we recall among Luca Signorelli's frescoes in the Cathedral of Orvieto (1499-1502) the ones that represent the destruction of the world and the resurrection of the body, where the ugliness of the bodies represented and the frailty of existence exposed to time can hardly be denied. The human being is nevertheless part of the world as a whole, welcomed by the sky above and nature underneath. Signoreili, says Clark, does not try to make his nudes the vehicles of beauty.

25 Many have classified Maja as a Giorgione-type representation of Venus, says Hetzer, but this is true only insofar as it is a mockery of the latter. "Nothing is left of Venus and the mythological content; this is a Spanish woman who has taken off her clothes, Goya's sitter, bold, lustful, crooked, lying on a rather ordinary greenish-blue sofa. All antique idealization has disappeared; the picture is dominated by vulgarity, laughing in the face of poetic magic. The pinkwhite body is sharply illuminated, detached from the sofa by the other colors. Boucher's prone naked girl is certainly an indecent picture, yet charmant, filled with the rhythmic motion of lines, colors and planes. Goya, on the other hand, does not succumb to these diversions, directing our attention at the reality of the naked human."

26 Hetzer, as I have mentioned, points out not only the destruction of the picture ("Zerstörung des Bildes") that takes place in Goya's painting, but also the changes in picture construction. We can witness this in the "fractures" and cut-outs of his Velázquez copies, in his making the picture boundless and the space-continuum uncertain, and in his representation of human beings, while the treatment of his subjects is dominated by what is transient, one-off and motif-like, by a lack of any comprehensive order. Hetzer thinks that neither Manet, nor Degas could help noticing these solutions. Goya's sitter, and The Clothed Maja (III. 6) he painted later, makes us all the more aware of how far we have got, as regards the emotions of shame and embarrassment, from the desired and idealized natural state. Speaking of man as the being capable of shame, Max Scheler says that this very emotion is the dividing line, where humans are in the state of transition and distinction (Gen. 3:7), and exist thrown into the interspace of being and essence. Humans wear clothes because they are ashamed, but their shame radiates through the clothes that cover their nakedness. The fact, says Scheler, that we feel erotic or even aesthetic excitement at the sight of nakedness derives from our being clothed.

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' This is why the observation Ivan Nagel makes in his book on Goya is so acute: following up, as it were, Rosenkranz's ideas on the relationship of obscenity and innocence, he says it is The Clothed Maja that has a feel of indecency, not the naked one. "Only because humans are clothed beings can they be stripped, and thereby debased, annihilated."

2S The picture makes it evident that for Goya the woman in the nude is not Venus but just a woman. Beauty can be bought, and when Manet painted his Olympia (III. 7), inspired by the Maja-copies that proliferated in Paris at the time (not to mention his studies of Titian, among others),

29 all he made obvious was that the painting, like the naked woman, expected to be bought. Art history had recently turned its interest to the bodily quality and the age-specific features of nudes, the representation, among other things, of the genitals and pubic hair, or their conspicuous absence. Ingres's studies for Roger Delivering Angelica (1818; Musée Ingres, Montauban) represent the woman as she is,

10 while the work itself features a figure almost completely divested of sexual qualities. Research has also found that Gérôme used a nude photograph by Nadar for his Phryne, presenting nevertheless the figure without pubic hair. Does a woman painted in other than her fleshand-blood reality look more virginal, is she that way more capable of representing what is a scarcely accepted ideality? This is art made to order, for the secret chambers, where arousing sexual desire does not entail a noisy scandal. Nagel writes that Courbet's exceptionally bold picture, L'origine du monde (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was ordered by a rich Turkish diplomat, who specifically wanted an obscene picture. I actually do not think the picture is obscene, of which more will be said later. The picture became covered the same way as Goya's naked Maja was, because Courbet was later obliged to disguise his "obscene" work with a landscape, The Castle Blonay, which is on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Chastity and, more generally, postures and gestures have a language of their own, and spoke out as early as antiquity. In a brilliant work,

31 Paul Zanker analyses the development of the gestural language of antique art, which was to influence the whole of Western art, taking a close look at Aphrodite's postures, the chaste position of the hand and the shy turning away of the trunk, as well as the gestures of compliance and surrender, that were copied from the earliest works on. Zanker claims that transcribing the discourse of the body into the discourse of art makes it possible for the viewer to transfer his or her immediate bodily-sensual apprehension into conscious and reflective perception. It seldom happens, and even then it seems a wicked joke on the part of Lucian, that the Aphrodite of Cnidos should enchant a young man to the point of orgasm. The turning of the 19th century to antiquity, or more particularly, its relation to antiquation, claims Zanker, was marked by a wish to satisfy sexual desire, and what was a taboo in contemporary conversation could thus find a roundabout way to fulfillment. It is an undeniable fact, as Goya's art beautifully testifies, that when the well-known and widely practiced mode of representing the body and the corresponding gestural language are emptied of their meaning, there immediately arises the demand for new versions.