In 19th-century nationalist imagery, the ‘ground’ of the homeland is fought for, soaked with blood, adored, prayed to – it is somber and awe-inspiring. Ferenczy’s pathos is different: all he wants is a home where he can be who he wants to be. To quote the letter informing the Matthias-monument committee of his resignation: ‘I have failed to secure a tiny piece of ground for myself.’ In this context, the change made by Ferenczy to Pliny’s original tale becomes particularly poignant. Instead of the wall, his shepherdess is drawing on the ground. Beneath her feet. To mark that little area as her own.
Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet tells the meandering love story of two rock musicians, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, as a modernised version of the Greek myth. Vina, a wonderful singer with an incomparable voice, dies in an earthquake – like Eurydice, she is killed by the ground beneath her feet. This is not, however, the only time she is betrayed by the ground she walks on. Vina and Ormus have to leave India to realise their potential. Still, despite acquiring worldwide fame abroad, they can never find a piece of ground for themselves. Displaced from home, having lost their points of reference, Vina and Ormus discover that the whole world had become precarious and uncertain. Earthquakes (and visits from alternate universes) are just the most extreme manifestations.
The trauma of not being appreciated and thus feeling displaced in his own homeland is expressed through the same metaphor in Ferenczy’s art. And that metaphor is wide-reaching. The tension between the lack of possibilities at home – due to poverty, a restrictive, quasi-feudal society, or dictatorial political regimes – and the lure of the wide world is articulated in countless products of Hungarian culture, from early-20th-century modernist poetry to underground music of the 1980s. But I would like to focus on something else now. Their melancholy notwithstanding, these stories have their good sides. Vina and Ormus might not have found a home, but their talent, now in full bloom, was appreciated by millions of people all over the world. Ferenczy may have felt like a failure, but from the 1840s the institutions he had wished for gradually came into being: exhibitions, galleries, an art academy, and, by the last decades of the century, even a collection of plaster casts. And, although not all of Count Széchenyi’s proposed social reforms found acceptance, his ideas on civil liberty lived on – things could never be the same as before. It is never futile to look at other parts of the world for inspiration, and the connections forged this way are what keep the world from falling apart, no matter how frail they seem. In today’s Europe, it is essential for East and West to look at each other with a new kind of empathy. We need to understand our differences deeply to be able to preserve what we share – to understand what is threatening it. The main thing is never to let go. As pointed out by Rushdie’s narrator: ‘Disorientation is the loss of the East.’
* A recent large project on István Ferenczy was an exhibition organised at the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2007 by Éva Bicskei, which yielded many new insights. My taking part in the research connected to the exhibition provided the inspiration for this post. In the summer of 2012, the Gemer-Malohont Muzeul (Gömör-Kishont Museum) in Rimavská Sobota organised a large exhibition commemorating the 220th anniversary of Ferenczy’s birth.
Although several essays on various aspects of his career have been published since then, the most comprehensive monograph on István Ferenczy is still: Simon Meller, Ferenczy István 1792-1856, Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, 1905.
** The debate is discussed in depth by Árpád Tímár, ‘Vita Ferenczy István Mátyás-emlékműtervéről [Debate on István Ferenczy's Planned Matthias Monument],’ Ars Hungarica 21 (1993): 163-202.
*** Hungarian National Gallery, Archives, Inv. No. 4132/1942
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