# Lili Árkayné Sztehló

Lili Árkayné Sztehló (7 November 1897 – 28 October 1959 in Budapest) was a Hungarian painter and artist, wife of Bertalan Árkay, best known for her stained glass window paintings in parish churches and cathedrals throughout Hungary.

## Biography

She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts studying under Lajos Deák Ébner, János Vaszary and Oszkár Glatz in 1923, later making scholarly trips to Rome and Paris. Initially, she was successful with her oil paintings, but by her late 20s she had become productive mainly in the field of ceramics and glass painting. Her major works include the glass windows of the City Hall of Mohács commemorating the Battle of Mohács (1927), the painted glass windows of the Pasarét Church and Heart of Jesus Church in Városmajor in Budapest (1932) and of the Gyárváros Church in Győr (1929), the window of St. Stephen's Mausoleum in Székesfehérvár (1938), the glass windows of the inner city church of Pécs (1943), and of the Saint Michael Cathedral in Veszprém (1954). Air raids during the Second World War caused serious damage to these works.
Árkayné Sztehló participated in a number of national and foreign applied arts exhibitions, including Monza in 1930, Rome in 1934, winning gold medals and the Grand Prix. In 1937 she exposed at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. She exposed in 1940 at the Triennale di Milano a stained glass depicting Elizabeth of Hungary.
She died in 1959.

## Her art

Lily Sztehlo perfectly solved the problem of modern church art in her field, the art of the colored window. The nature of the material also helped her in this, because the most valuable property of colored glass is the saturation of the color with light, and this brilliance it is killed by those who - as the Renaissance did because of their fascination for perspective and plastic forms - consider glass as a basis for painting. Lily Sztehlo, like modern art in general, takes over the correct technique from the masters of the Middle Ages, lays out the object she wants to depict from colored glass pieces, and forms the lines of the drawing from the lead holder connecting the glass pieces. This the procedure requires the artist to renounce the representation of space structured according to the laws of perspective, to build her compositions flat and to simplify the lines of her drawing to the last detail. As many cancellations, as many profits. Especially in the art of the church.
In her colored glass compositions, strives to express the ideological theme in such a way that, by not only taking into account the nature of the glass, but also making use of its mentioned properties, it does not fall short of the figural painting in any way, she must have been blessed with an unusual talent similar to Egyptian sculptors, who knew how to express the full liveliness of life in extremely simplified forms.
The simplest poses, the barely moving movements crystallize the expression of the soul, the barely visible bends of the simplified contours clearly give life to the forms they delineate.
The number of Lily Sztehlo's creations is almost astounding. Richness is understood not only in the extraordinary size of the number of works, - the artist herself did not even know the number of her window compositions - but rather in the surprising expression of the inexhaustible ingenuity with which, moving around the almost identical topic, she not only found solutions testifying to the new experience of the task, but also as if she just enjoyed the grappling with difficulties, she was able to create bravura compositions for windows of such unfavorable proportions that most artists would have despaired.
The creation of the windows of the church in Városmajor dragged on for several years from 1932, and it happened more than once that the artist was forced to give way to public agitation, because the public could not rise to the height of her art.
Lily Sztehlo's art turns in a new direction in her post-war works. In her compositions with biblical subjects, as in the windows of the church of Szentkirály of Vasmegye and the chapel of the bishop's castle in Győr, she populates her windows with human and angelic characters from sacred stories in a similar way to the narrative mood of medieval glass artists, and she does not use abstract geometric forms as decoration, but stylized leafy trees, flowers and birds.
Three series of windows depicting Hungarian saints were made at short intervals. The first one goes to the church in Lébény, the second series depicting all the Hungarian saints goes to the Hegykő church. The artist has completed the final touches on the cartons of the third series, and within a few months the finished work will shine in the Gothic chapel integrated into the Győr Cathedral.
Apart from Budapest, we can find Sztehlo Lily's works scattered all over Transdanubia, but one even reached the Great Plain in 1959.

## Stained glass windows in the Galyatető Roman Catholic Church

* Stephen I of Hungary
* Saint Emeric of Hungary
* Saint Margaret of Hungary
* Elizabeth of Hungary
* Ladislaus I of Hungary
* Stained glass window