The
schooling of Pavel Künl (1817, Mlada Boleslav −1871, Ljubljana) was very similar
to that of other Slovene artists in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Janez Wolf
and Anton Karinger, Künl too started his career in the army. Immediately after
the painter’s birth, his family moved from Mlada Boleslav to Ljubljana together
with the Seventeenth Regiment where the father was military senior physician.
The Regiment, which Pavel joined when he was sixteen, was stationed most of the
time in Italy. While there, he began to acquire drawing skills and in the end
even taught drawing classes in the cadet school. In 1842, he left the army and
enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna, where he studied through the year
1844 when he returned to Ljubljana and worked afterwards at the address of
Gradišče no. 24 until his death. The National Gallery of Slovenia purchased
quite a number of his drawings, among others also two nudes created at the
Academy, luckily signed and dated. They are interesting for having been
modelled on two old templates which fall into the time of the preparation and
implementation of the 1772 reform of the Vienna Akademie der bildenden Künste.
Pavel Künl copied his drawing Standing
Male Nude with Outstretched Left Arm, Leaning on His Right Arm, 1844, from
the same example as Janez Potočnik had copied one of his own drawings seventy
years earlier. The example has not been identified for the time being, but the
posture exposing the perspectival foreshortening, spade-like hands, the
handling of rib muscles and knees and the loincloth are explicit harbingers of
new positionings of live models, such as were introduced by Jakob Matthias
Schmutzer (1733−1811) after Parisian examples adapted for home environment. The
musculature and the body composition were thus given emphasized expressive significance,
unknown in the academic tradition.
Heracles with a Club and Lion Hide (Standing Male Nude), likewise dated with the final year of Künl’s study, belongs to
classical aesthetic orientation. The nude ephebic figure in a meditative pose
leans on a club with a lion hide hung over it. In terms of iconography, we are
faced with the recognizable figure of
Heracles
at the Crossroads. Although his anatomy shows no explicit signs of
supernatural power but rather it is subordinated to ideal proportions and the
ideal of beauty, which in Künl’s drawing is further enhanced by soft, gentle
line and shadowing, the attributes unambiguously identify the motif. The model
depiction was made by the Roman painter Pompeo Batoni (1708−1787) in
1764. Already in 1790, the Academy had at its disposal ten “nicely hatched
drawings by Pompeius Batoni as an aid in teaching fundamentals of history
painting” (Knofler 2001). There were also nudes among them whose postures are
more modern, but their rendering always followed the ideal beauty of
classically proportioned bodies and harmonized musculature. His nudes are
furnished with attributes in an undefined space provided that no concrete
supports were needed.
The universal ideal form
surpasses centuries, but Künl left traces of his own time in his drawings. He
complemented the abstracted space and support accessories with details – with
greenery, a wall made of ashlars, and shadowing of the entire surface of the
sheet, by which he conjured a suggestion of concrete space in both of the
discussed cases. The almost botanic precision of rendering the greenery under
the garden wall in the drawing of the nude made supposedly after Schmutzer
belongs to the new aesthetic orientation, which was introduced into the art of
Central Europe by Romanticism and was also embraced by Biedermeier. The
simultaneous use of two different aesthetic conceptions more than seventy years
after the making of the two original examples shows that, despite swearing by
drawing from live models on principle, the curriculum of the Vienna Academy
dictated correction of nature according to traditional academic ideals of
beauty.