Tizian a Josefina. Českost, světovost a modernost Josefa Mánesa

The portrait of a young woman named Josefina is a paraphrase of a famous model in the work of Josef Mánes – Titian’s Toilette of a Young Woman from the collections of the Prague Castle Picture Gallery. In this context, it is possible to consider what models Mánes himself professed and why and how his work was influenced by the constant ideological-theoretical effort to define Czechness, but at the same time the worldliness of domestic painting. In this paper I deal with the development of the idea of such models (medieval and baroque) and the contemporary idea of their Czechness. In Mánes’ case, I focus on the connection between the idea of Czechness and the folk elements defined in 1848 thanks to Ludvík Rittersberg, but also with the valued examples of the anti-academic approach to colour as a key means of painting. Another tendency can be observed in the appreciation of Baroque artists and is also reflected in the selection of works for the very first major public exhibition of domestic art held in Kutná Hora in 1867. The aim of the paper is therefore to reflect on how the idea of defining Czechness and the worldliness of domestic painting changed in the third quarter of the 19th century and what role the work of Josef Mánes played in this. The second level is to ask which of these phenomena stood out as the current painting theme of his time and which of the idea of the Czechness, worldliness and modernity of Mánes’s work is a projection of later interpretations.

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