Lajos Petri (Lajos Pick), who was one of the most authentic sculptors in Europe. It also introduces the absolute peak of his life, a height in his career when he was finally able to close a long period of inner struggle with himself. He became a real artist in the catharsis of this struggle. This piece of art is not a silent sculpture; it tells us a story that everyone can interpret according to his/her own experiences.We are not forced to follow anyone else’s interpretation, yet there are some suggestions how to understand it.

Petri adapted the story of Jacob and the angel, which is well known in Jewish and Christian culture, so that he could express the pain and release of the individual. His sculpture does not show the moments of the physical fight (Genesis 32: 24–25). The way the angel is moving and the gesture imply rather the act of absolution and blessing; thus Petri, grasps the moment when the angel is blessing Jacob (Genesis 32: 30). It seems as if God from above through the angel were reaching his hands towards Jacob. In this gesture love and care are portrayed which are more characteristic to women rather than to men. This might be one reason why the sculptor chose a female figure, although in the original Hebrew text (Genesis 32: 24) we can read the word ִאיש [i:ʃ] which generally means ‘man’. This is how it is translated also in the King James Bible (1611): Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. The prefix of the verbָ א ַבק [ɑbɑk] in 3rd pers. sing. is a yod which refers to the object of the verb as a man. Here we can note that also in the book of Isaiah God describes his unconditional love compared to the love of a mother: 
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you [...] (Isaiah 66: 13. King James Bible).

If we compare Petri’s statue to other depiction of the story, e.g. to the engraving Jacob luttant avec l'Ange by Gustave Doré (1855) or to the mural in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice painted by Eugène Delacroix around 1861, then we will see two wrestling characters. Even in Gustave Moreau’s Jacob et l'Ange painted in 1878 (Musée National, Paris) in which the angelis portrayed as a woman, the act between the characters depicts the fight. The novelty in Petri’s sculpture is that he decided to portray the act when the characters have just finished wrestling and the angel is blessing Jacob.

The story of Jacob and the angel is interesting for another reason as well. As the name Israel also shows, the fight is not against Jacob, the actual meaning of Israel is ‘God fights (for you).’ The name Israel is both a personal name and the name of a people. How this name was given, is described in the story of Jacob and the angel:

Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. […] And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. (Gen. 32: 24–30. King James Bible, 1611)

This is how Israel got its name, which is crucial to understand how Israel was born.

The sculpture is the manifestation of something that cannot be verbalised, something that all men and women, young and old carry as a burden: the questionable meaning of our earthly existence, the unsatisfiable nature of our human greed and yearning, our fear of death.

At the same time, the sight of this sculpture invokes a certain sensation in us; as if it were able to make us hear the words we exchange with our soul. By looking at the sculpture, we visualize the fight with ourselves, a struggle for salvation, which actually fills our shortearthly life with meaning; and which struggle by God’s grace may result in the salvation of our soul. Looking at the sculpture, as if we could feel that it is covered by God’s grace. So that the whole vision can be easily understood, beauty – so to speak – radiates from the sculpture.

Petri made Jacob and the angel in the same year when he also made a monument to commemorate the hussars of the 2ndTransylvania Regiment who fell in World War I. This would be later erected in Buda Castle and Petri made it after having taken an order from the Hungarian state. The man wearing a steel helmet on horseback is explicitly a heroic statue and was meant for the public, whereas Jacob and the angel shows the most hidden emotions of the sculptor. As Petri himself tells us – in a brochure prepared for one of his exhibitions in 1960 in Budapest – his father, one of the wealthiest men in Hungary at that time, disinherited him because Petri had chosen the life of an artist instead of becoming a successful lawyer. As a young man he may have felt as the boy in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11– 32). He was longing for his father’s absolution in vain. His family did not show any sign of interest in his life or art, although he had become a successful sculptor. In the gesture of the angel we might recognise this absolution, or rather his desire for the absolution that he was expecting rather from God than from his family at the time of making the sculpture.

The sculpture Jacob and the angel is not heroic. Jacob is portrayed in his position as asubject to higher power; he is fallen unto the ground. Yet God’s angel is reaching her hand as if she were about to help him stand up. Thus, Petri confesses his faith in God, faith that he needed so much in that epoch.