Date: 22-07-2007
Owning Institution: Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010      
Subject: Renaissance        

Lucas Cranach’s Eve is a lithe Germanic temptress with an alluring half smile playing on her lips. Her skin is pale, her frame slender. She might almost be an ivory figurine come to life. With her left hand she reaches up to caress one of the boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. As if in response to some charge of unseen electricity generated by that contact, the long curls of her white-blonde hair flare and crackle, creating a radiant nimbus of spiralling tresses around her naked form. She is the original pin-up, imagined at the moment when she plunges mankind into Original Sin.

Poor bamboozled Adam, delivered into temptation by this irresistible sex queen, stands no chance. A seemingly simple fellow, he scratches his head with his left hand while with his right he takes the fateful apple offered to him by his consort. He looks like a man in a trance, destined to succumb but caught in the last instant of his indecision. Above the couple, twined in the branches of the tree, the serpent stretches down towards Eve. Its whispering has to be imagined – the false promise that forbidden fruit will transform man and woman into gods.

This nakedly titillating image of sexual temptation is liberally sown with Christian symbolism. That was in part how Cranach allowed his patrons, pillars of the Saxon nobility, to enjoy his soft pornography with a clear conscience – his way of arming them with the alibi of pious reflection. A grape vine springs from the Tree of Knowledge, its leaves decorously covering Adam and Eve’s genitalia, its bunches of fruit symbolising the wine of the Eucharist – and thus the salvation of mankind from sin by Christ, “the second Adam”. A menagerie of emblematic beasts has congregated at the couple’s feet, each one adding another marginal gloss on the deeper meanings of the Fall. A stag with antlers, traditional symbol of the resurrected Christ, crouches at Adam’s feet. Another, smaller deer drinks thirstily from a pool, in which its face is darkly doubled in reflection – a fine touch of painterly virtuosity, evoking Psalm 42, where humanity thirsting after God is compared to a deer thirsting after water. Behind is a sheep, humility embodied. A lion and wild boar lurk watchfully, tame for now but ready to become the enemies of mankind in the postlapsarian world. In the background a white horse, spooked by the imminence of disaster, heads for safety. The sense of a fateful moment, held forever in suspension by the artifice of the painter, is enhanced by the twilit clarity of the air. Light suffuses the horizon, but above the sky darkens to emerald and azure. The sun has just gone down and everything is about to change.

Cranach’s Adam and Eve, painted in 1526, is one of the treasures of the Courtauld Gallery’s Northern Renaissance collections. “Temptation in Eden” is a small but beautifully put together exhibition which aims – on the model of the National Gallery’s “Painting in Focus” shows of some years back – to set this beguiling fantasy in its historical context. Assembling a number of related works, mostly by Cranach, some by his German contemporaries, such as Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the show paints an absorbing picture of this enterprising artist, his extensive workshop and predominantly German aristocratic clientele.

After Holbein and Durer, Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) is the most celebrated German painter of the Renaissance. Yet as the Courtauld Institute’s Director, Deborah Swallow, points out, this is the first exhibition ever devoted to him in England. Max Friedlander, one of the early twentieth century’s most eminent scholars of German and Netherlandish painting, may be partly to blame. In 1932 he published an influential monograph on Cranach from which the artist emerged as a tragic wastrel of his own talents. Friedlander had an immense regard for the work of Cranach’s youth. But he believed that after 1505, when Cranach became court painter to the Dukes of Saxony in Wittenburg, greatly expanding his workshop and producing numerous versions of every picture, he degenerated into little more than a parody of his former self. “Had Cranach died in 1505,”  Friedlander thundered, “he would have lived in our memory as an artist charged with dynamite. But he did not die until 1553, and instead of watching his powers explode, we see them fizzle out… As a dreamer Cranach promised what in cold reality he was unable to fulfil. The works of his Wittenberg period make one think of a smooth, shiny chestnut that has broken out of a prickly green shell. The impassioned symphony of nature gives way before a cool, precise, rational exposition.”

Friedlander’s criticisms contained a kernel of truth about Cranach, who from quite early in his career depended a great deal on a veritable army of studio assistants and apprentices. As a result, many of his compositions survive in multiple versions of admittedly varying quality. There was a lively market for works such as his Adam and Eve, numerous variations of which may be found in the museums of Northern Europe and America; and it was not uncommon for his principal masters, the Electors of Saxony, to request as many as sixty individual copies of a particular state portrait.

Unlike the introspective and highly intellectual Durer, Cranach had no qualms about tailoring his style to the demands of mass-production. He avoided the elaborately calculated perspectives of the Italian Renaissance, preferring a flattened, shallow space into which people, animals and objects – many painted by different assistants with differing specialisations – might mingle as easily as the elements in a collage. This was once taken as evidence for Cranach’s stylistic medievalism but is more sensibly regarded as a sign of his ingenuity – a way of disguising potential inconsistencies in the group output of the workshop. For the same reason he narrowed the range of his techniques and simplified his methods so that they could be easily copied by others – painting skin, for example, particularly that of naked young women, as though it were as smooth and blemish-free as marble. He developed stock compositional formulae for the particular sizes of panel on which he and his workshop painted. He developed formulae and devices for almost everything, even the reflection of light in a figure’s eyes. There is striking evidence for this in the Courtauld Gallery’s own Adam and Eve. Look into Eve’s face and it turns out that the cross bars of a mullion window are reflected in here eyes. A formula for painting scenes in indoor settings has been mistakenly applied to a landscape.

What Cranach offered his patrons was a secular art designed purely for pleasure. His prolific scale of production suggests that they could not get enough of it. As well as painting his numerous versions of Adam and Eve he specialised in pictures of mythological subjects such as Venus and Cupid or Apollo and Diana. Such works were often hung together, which may suggest how superficial was the piety thought to inhere in them. He also painted various fantasy pictures of primitive man, drawn from the writings of the classical authors Lucretius and Hesiod. A taste for such works may have been stimulated by the discovery of the New World. The Courtauld exhibition contains first-rate examples of each theme, borrowed variously from the Royal Collection, from the Getty Museum in California and the National Gallery in London – Grade-A factory product, so to speak, indicated by the imprimatur of the Cranach studio in the form of a winged golden serpent painted unobtrusively on a stone or tree-trunk in the scene.

The formula is generally the same. The artist furnishes his clients with a gorgeous naked woman to gawp at. He allows them to justify the experience, if they will, as an act of religious contemplation or as the expression of a fashionably scholarly interest in the myths and legends of antiquity. His depictions of the barbarism of early man were presumably intended to make a flattering contrast with the civilisation and sophistication of the palaces in which they were hung. There is sometimes an anachronistic palace or castle in the background of such scenes, perched on a high crag. There is often the suggestion of a forest teeming with game. These were all things that his patrons, rich landowners with a fondness for hunting, liked to contemplate. Cranach’s pictures reflected their own good fortune back at them in an ideal form. They also made him rich enough to be listed as the second-wealthiest man in Wittenberg – rich enough to go hunting himself, to judge by a number of exquisite drawings of dead game, which, according to legend, he carried out in situ while resting on the chase.

Cranach was also a close friend of Luther, and he painted numerous altarpieces and devotional works influenced by Protestant ideas – although, as the Courtauld show also demonstrates, he did so with less panache than he brought to his more erotically charged paintings. He seems never to have been accused of obscenity, which is perhaps surprising in the climate of the Reformation. It may have helped that there was a sound humanist justification for the creation of his mildly pornographic fantasies. In his fifteenth-century treatise On Painting, the Renaissance architect and all-round intellectual, Leonbattista Alberti, had argued that rich men intent on fathering fine sons should hang paintings of female nudes in their marital bedchambers, to promote the circulation of vital fluids. In her essay in the catalogue for this show, Susan Foister notes that the inventory taken of Henry VIII’s possessions at his death included both an Adam and Eve and a Lucretia by Cranach – raising the tantalising possibility that one of the painter’s naked ladies may have played an aphrodisiac role at the conception of Elizabeth I.