Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)
Tanulmányok / Studies - Imre Györgyi: A modell / The Model
the rationalist criticism of the Bible current at the time. Backed up by the doctrine of German Catholic theologian Staudenmayer and influenced by Creutzer's early neoPlatonist monotheism, Ipolyi felt that the primitive state of man was characterised by monotheism. 'Therefore it wasn't the rudimentary religious notions that created the more superior level of religious systems, but vice versa. Eventually human ignorance, lack of education and the restricted nature of revelations produced mythology as a secondary and contaminated form." 2 ' Arnold Ipolyi's research for Hungarian Mythology had a significant influence at the time. It is something Géza Róheim also mentions in the foreword of his work entitled Hungarian Popular Belief and Folk Traditions (1925): 'I dreamt in my childhood about writing the new Ipolyi— although this is not the book I had imagined, I feel nevertheless that it's a modest step towards the goal." 24 We have no information on the extent to which the topics of István Csók's early paintings, like those of Erzsébet Báthori (1895), were influenced by Ipolyi's compilation. In his works Csók accords the world of folkloric beliefs and pictorial expression with the descriptions of modern psychology. He did this partly as a result of the method of education he received at the Model Drawing School from Bertalan Székely who, on the evidence of his notes from 1878, observed Lajos Thanhoffer's mad female patient and also visited Szent Rókus Hospital to study the mentally ill. 125 It was at the Model Drawing School that Csók made the first sketch for Erzsébet Báthori. 126 He could have learnt about the latest results in psychology, accessible in Budapest at the beginning of the 1900s, from the early writings of Sándor Ferenczi who studied at the famous Viennese psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing. 12 " (Cat. VIII-23-24) European travellers who set off on expeditions around the world acquired Hungarian followers chiefly in the second half of the 19th century. I2X Quests for the prehistoric homeland —gaining momentum from Sándor Csorna Körösi's similar feat—were followed by Ármin Vámbéry's travels in the 1860s, seeking 'true' kinship. His experience, along with the formulating of the similarity between the character of the Hungarians and Turks, was what inspired the series of Hungarian depictions of odalisques, as in the case of Aladár Körösfői Kriesch's Cassandra. (Cat. 111-33) János Xantus, travelling to the Far East on the commission of the minister József Eötvös in 1896, brought home source-material that was detached from the fiction of a national prehistory and included a valuable photographic collection. (Cat. 111-18-21) The first effect the Japanese material had on fine arts was Bertalan Székely's Japanese Woman (Cat. X-l), who is placed among purple flowers of morning glory —a plant also native to Hungary. In the background of this we see the new concept of the Museum —propagated by Ferenc Pulszky already in 1852 in London where in respect of the British Museum he was asked to give a paper on the questions of organising and arranging exhibitions. 'In a lecture entitled On the Progress and Decay of Art; and on the Arrangement of a National Museum, which he delivered in University Hall, London, he criticised the British Museum not only for its concept for an exhibition presenting the entire known world, in which "we move from the masterpieces of the Parthenon straight on to a stuffed whale and a buffalo next to it, and where two giant giraffes guard the entrance to the collection of the vases", but also for its one-sided approach, its restriction to the art of the Greek, Roman and Etruscan peoples, demanding the extension of the collecting work and the interest to Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Indian, and even Chinese and Japanese art—as indeed it had been the case in the Fejérváry collection —(although excluding from this list the art of the "barbarous peoples of Africa and Oceania"), so as to be able to give a complete picture of the entirety of the artistic imagination of mankind (in the interest of which he proposed that the presentation of original objects should be complemented with the display of plaster copies)' —revealed János György Szilágyi, in his Biography of the Other-Pulszky. The public was able to see Xantus' oriental collection and Bertalan Székely's Japanese Woman together at the 1873 Viennese world exhibition, where Ferenc Pulszky, director of the National Museum, ordered a collection of classical plaster-casts from the Martinelli Company. 12 '' Whether there existed a 19th-century Hungarian analogy to the imperial fashion that appeared parallel to anthropological research and created hierarchies from the contrast between the whiteness of marble statues and the colour of the human skin is yet to be explored. We know, however, that one of the last examples of travelling prints, connected to the Koi Sarah Bartmann, can be found in the 1942 German and 1944 Hungarian edition of Fritz Kahn's book entitled Miracles of the Human Body, where the two types of female beauty, the Venus de Medici and the Hottentot Venus, are shown side by side. 'On the left we see the normally cushioned body of a European woman — the classic ideal of Greek beauty. While on the right we can see the abnormally obese body of the black woman: the fat has mainly settled around the hips ("Hottentot rear") —this is the ideal of beauty of the African peoples!' The book uses a print from London from 1811 for the illustration of the Hottentot Venus. (III. 13) The 'nature' of women became at the time an independent subject of scientific research as the continuation of the enlightened 18th-century tradition which helped women with their intellectual progression and the perception of their own bodies and personalities. 1,0 In the catalogue of the National Széchényi Library we can find —just like formerly Virginia Woolf —a considerable amount of catalogue cards dealing with women from certain aspects. 131 At the beginning of the 19th century a group of scientists started examining the female 'species'. From the preface of Gusztáv Remellay's The Influence of the Womankind on our Country's Past (1847) to Dr József Perényi's popular lecture entitled Fashion, Disfigurer of the Human Body (1861)—either to emphasise the imperfections of the figure of a live woman or on account of her various similarities with idealised beauty —parallels
