BECK Ö. Fülöp
1873, Pápa – 1945, Budapest

Emese’s dream

1922
marble

Emese, the mother of Prince Álmos, was impregnated while asleep by the totem of the Árpáds, the Turul bird. The story was handed down by Anonymus, a late twelfth century chronicler, and a codex from the 1360s, the Chronicon pictum. The subject was taken up as Hungary’s national Romanticism emerged (in Arnold Ipolyi’s Magyar Mythológia, 1854), and gained wider currency during the preparations for the millennial celebrations (1896), and in the Horthy era (1920–1944), when the prehistory of the Magyars entered the agenda of official cultural policy. An 1864 drawing by Soma Orlai Petrics, which represents a clothed Emese with an angel-like figure, rather than the Turul, did not come to influence later representations. What with the lack of iconographic precedents, the period of historicism saw the use of the somewhat similar story of Leda and the swan as a model, which made the scene unjustifiably sensual: Emese is seen naked, with the beak of the Turul touching her lips.
Fülöp Ö. Beck also represented the ancestress of the House of Árpád without clothes, but the relationship of the two figures is less intimate. The bird at the feet of the female figure is static, not animated, which lends weight to the symbolic meaning of the scene. In a sense, the composition is reminiscent of medieval funerary monuments, which often included the heraldic beast (i.e. totem) of the deceased.