Ferdo Vesel captured not only an academic semi-nude of a man with a prop
sabre in his right hand on the canvas, but also a studio where we see a
classmate at work, a drawing of a head and a painting of yellow flowers in the
background. The painter's brushstrokes are at their most deliberate on the
body, which is pale in the parts usually covered by the shirt and tanned on the
neck and arms. Towards the edges of the canvas, the brushwork relaxes, as
befits an academic study.
The male nude has been part of the Western art since Antiquity, both in
Greek originals and Roman copies that mostly survive in marble. The
Renaissance, which revived the study of live models, anecdotally used the
recently deceased for the study of anatomy, but also made use of ancient
sculpture. Only a few works were known in the first few centuries of the modern
era, mostly unearthed in Italy, so all the artists who travelled there for
study brought home similar ideals, thus establishing a canon that was still
very much alive in the 19th century, especially in the context of academy
study. The Belvedere Torso, otherwise
a Roman copy of an earlier work, is still one of the most celebrated male nudes
today: the absence of limbs and head, the timeless whiteness of the originally
painted marble and the characteristic contrapposto fold and twist above the
navel were all the features admired by Michelangelo (1475–1564) that echoed
right into the 20th-century art. Academy study of painting in the 19th century
began with a drawing class where students were imitating Ancient models – most
often plaster casts collected by academies and museums in their glyptotheques.
When students progressed and began to draw from live models, these were
mostly men. The situation was different in private schools and evening courses,
where women models were present. Artists also used photography to help them
study the human form. The artists could also morph a male nude into a female
one, with varying degrees of success. The male models were placed in typical
poses that allowed them to pose still and for long periods, sometimes with the
help of a stick or a rope, while some of their poses were more often associated
with the female nude.
Ferdo Vesel (Ljubljana, 1861–1946), unlike Ivana Kobilca (1861–1926),
was able to study the nude as part of his academy studies, first in Vienna
(1878–1882) and then in Munich, where he lived until 1895. In addition to live
models, he also studied the nude, both male and female, through photography –
commercial photographs of models were available, but he and Ivana Kobilca also
used the ones they took themselves. The difference between the artistic nude
and the pornographic nude was the model's positioning, lighting, the model’s
surroundings and paraphernalia and reception – whether the motif passed
public/official scrutiny. The easiest way to avoid ostracism was to code-switch
depending on the environment. Slovenian artists knew the nude was not welcome in
their homeland, just as it was not even worth talking about in certain
international bourgeois circles of painting enthusiasts.
In Munich, Vesel attended the classes of Ludwig von Löfftz (1845–1910),
professor of composition and painting technique at the Munich Academy. Löfftz
later became its director (1891–1899), bringing it closer to the Seccesion
movement (est. in Munich in 1892) and thus keeping it relevant – during his
tenure a generation of future modernist masters studied at the Academy, who
supplemented their learning in the Munich private schools, including the one by
Anton Ažbe (1862–1905).
Professor Löfftz, otherwise better known for his landscapes, ran two
busy studios where students painted portraiture, the head and the nude. It was
in this Munich environment that Vesel produced the Male Semi-Nude with Sabre and the Kneeling Male Nude, a kind of secular saint and Vesel's graduation
work. This is also hinted at in a photograph found by Dr Markus Fellinger of
the Belvedere Gallery, Austria – Ferdo Vesel posing with his classmates and the
model depicted in the latter painting.