Cranach

Last summer the Courtauld Institute of Art gallery brought us the wonderful Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, an exhibition of Cranach’s work centred around the title painting. Now this tender young shoot has blossomed into Cranach, an exhibition current at the Royal Academy of Arts. This is the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c1472 – 1553). It is a collaboration between the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and the Royal Academy, bringing together over seventy works.

Little is known about the early life of Cranach, except that he was born c. 1472 in Kronach, Upper Franconia. In 1501 or 2 he arrived in Vienna and worked as a painter in the Danube region before moving to Wittenberg. In 1505 he became court artist to the electors of Saxony. He established a highly productive workshop and worked for three successive rulers.

Cranach became a friend of the theologian, Martin Luther, then Professor of Theology at Wittenberg University. Cranach shared in Luther’s devotion to the Reformation in the church that was taking place at the time. He supervised the printing of Luther’s pamphlets, designed woodcuts for Luther’s translation of the New Testament, painted altarpieces for Lutheran churches and made portraits of Protestant reformers and princes, including one of Luther himself. However, Cranach numbered Catholics among his patrons, including Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. Luther’s painting of him as St Jerome, in included in the exhibition.

What was the appeal of Cranach’s work? In addition to his religious subjects, Cranach was a court painter. He painted portraits of lords, ladies and other notable people and their children, in the graceful and flowing costumes of the times. He was one of the first artists to paint full-length portraits and the faces of his subjects show his skill in psychological characterization, something that later artists were to master.

Cranach took a significant role in the German Renaissance. His religious altarpieces were no longer the flat, brightly-coloured ‘heavens’ of earlier painters but set in naturalistic landscapes with trees and birds and animals. He undertook his mythical subjects in similar settings. Both Apollo and Diana (c 1526) and The Golden Age (c. 1530) evoke a paradise lost, a time when the world was young and perfect, and the lion lay down with the lamb. The scenes of bucolic beauty are set against the ‘Cranach’ sky; a blending of pink and yellow against the earthly horizon deepening to blue as it rises to heaven.

Other works in the exhibition include The Martyrdom of St Catherine, (c 1505, Raday Library of the Hungarian Reformed Church, Budapest) and The Judgement of Paris, (1513, Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth). It is open until June 8 and is a must for all Cranach fans.

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