Self-Portrait Sándor Kozina

Known chiefly for his portraits, Kozina is a representative of early Hungarian romantic painting. During his academic years in Vienna, palatine Joseph took note of his painting Deluge and offered him a grant of 400 forints per year for four years to improve his artistic skills. In 1829 Kozina went to Italy. The diary notes of his friend and patron Bertalan Szemere reveal that he visited several towns including Florence, Naples, and Venice, and sojourned for a longer time in Rome. He probably returned to Florence several times, as this Self-Portrait proves. The romantic self-portrait concentrates on personality traits, character, emotional-psychic states of mind rather than the externalities, and belongs to a type of portrait that became popular in the mid-nineteenth-century. The background does not merely indicate the venue where the picture was painted like a topographic guide, but it is also an important source of the atmosphere with its rich painterly elements. The swirl of dark clouds and the radiant strip of the blue sky in the distance suggest the passing of a storm. The rays of the setting sun sharply illuminate the famous buildings of Florence, the Duomo and the Campanile, as well as the Ponte Vecchio, and glitter on the Arno. The landscape is not just a sign or empty setting but the emotional background of the portrait, the venue of the painter’s life in an important phase of his career. | Zsuzsanna Bakó