Date: 09-03-2008
Owning Institution: The Royal Academy
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:   Renaissance    

Recent London exhibitions of Lucas Cranach call to mind old jokes about the buses. You wait five centuries, then two come along at once. Last summer the Courtauld Institute brought together some of Cranach’s finest religious and mythological paintings, in the first serious exhibition of his work ever staged in this country. Now, within less than six months, the Royal Academy has put on its own exhibition of the German Renaissance master’s work, in its Sackler Wing Galleries. The timing is undeniably odd, but this is hardly a case of overkill. The pictures are mostly different, and whereas the Courtauld had focussed principally on Cranach’s later productions, the Royal Academy follows him all the way through his long and prolific career – and demonstrates, with particular force, just what an exceptional, idiosyncratic painter he was in his youth.

An exact contemporary of the celebrated Albrecht Durer, the young Cranach set out to prove that anything Durer could do, he could better – or at least bloodier. The first gallery of the Royal Academy’s show is notable for gore, guts and thunder. A pair of large woodcut engravings of The Crucifixion, created circa 1502 and evidently inspired by Durer’s woodcuts on the same theme, transport the viewer into a spectacular theatre of cruelty. In both images, a gaunt and emaciated Christ hangs by his sinews, his head weighed down by a crown of thorns so large that it resembles a spiked turban. In one of the woodcuts the Bad Thief is nailed to a tree so gnarled and bent that he is doubled over in the torment of his crucifixion, his head almost touching his knees. In the other, his torture is symmetrically reversed, so that he has been bent spine-shatteringly backwards across the top of his T-shaped cross. The Roman soldiers in both scenes have been recast as German landsknechts - stocky, sausage-fed sadists, mounted on horseback and chuckling contentedly amongst themselves. Even Golgotha, “the land of the skull”, has been made to seem more forbidding and horrific than usual. The ground is littered not only with skulls, but with entire, decomposing bodies, trampled under the feet of the soldiers’ horses.

Nearby hangs Cranach’s oil-painting of the same subject, done in about 1500 and thought to be the earliest surviving work by his hand. Here the horror is enhanced by full-colour treatment. Christ’s body, covered with suppurating wounds, runs with fresh blood. Blood even runs from his nose. There is a rotting cadaver at the foot of this cross too, but this time it is a gangrenous green and is being gnawed by a mangy dog. Another striking example of the young Cranach’s raw intensity is a small Stigmatisation of Saint Francis, of 1502-3. The saint seems almost as though he is under attack from the heavenly vision of Christ in the skies. He raises his hands and cranes his neck, tilting his rough, worn, wrinkled walnut of a face up towards the apparition. Even the leaves of the trees and the waving grass by the saint’s side seem to quiver with excitement and anticipation.

Like Durer, in whose studio he may have spent some time, the young Cranach rooted his art in study from the life. His saints are clearly portraits of real, flesh-and-blood people, while his landscapes clearly reflect places that he knew, and had sketched – all transformed and transfigured by his keen imagination. The most spectacularly vivid work of Cranach’s youth must be The Martyrdom of St Catherine, which the artist probably painted in Wittenberg in 1505. It is not an especially well-known painting, owned as it is by the somewhat out-of-the-way Raday Library of the Reformed Church, in Budapest. But it is in magnificent condition and stands revealed, by this show, as one of the most extraordinary works of Northern European Renaissance art. It is one of those early sixteenth-century German pictures in which everything seems to be happening at once. The sky is a surreal firework display, dark clouds opening so that the unseen angel of the Lord can unleash volley after volley of pink and yellow thunderbolts. Beneath, a multitude reels in terror. The shattered wheel on which Catherine was to have been broken by her tormentor, the Roman Emperor Maxentius, has burst into flames. Beneath it lie the tangled bodies of the heathen, including the upside-down form of a curly-haired young man in a bright gold costume that looks uncannily like a 1505 prototype for the designs of Dolce and Gabbana. The centre of the composition is dominated by the figures of Catherine and her burly executioner. She is a pearly-skinned aristocratic beauty, kneeling in prayer as she prepares to meet her maker, while her killer is an evil psychopath dressed up like a half-baked harlequin, in a parti-coloured white suit complete with bulging codpiece. He adjusts the position of his victim’s head with mock tenderness, making sure he has a good open expanse of neck at which to aim his unsheathing sword.

1505, the year that he painted The Martyrdom of St Catherine, turned out to be something of an annus mirabilis for Cranach. In that year, he was appointed court painter to Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. Settling in Wittenburg, Cranach took on duties that included the invention of crests and heraldry as well as the design of armour and jousting equipment – tasks to which his flexible talents proved extremely well suited. He continued to paint devotional pictures of considerable power and compression – including a beautifully tender nocturnal Nativity and a powerfully ascetic St Jerome in the Desert, which has travelled to London all the way from Mexico City. Several depictions of Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist, the veins and tendons of his severed neck realised with butcher-shop accuracy, suggest that Cranach retained a lively interest in the more gruesome details of Christian legend.

Cranach also became a first-rate portraitist. His portrait diptych of John the Steadfast with his six-year-old son Frederick, of 1509, is a picture that touchingly expresses the dynastic hopes of Cranach’s princely patron. The father gazes out with a veiled expression, impassive but implicitly focussed on the future that he dreams of for his only son, who is the picture of vulnerable innocence. Father wears black and is shown against a green background; son wears green and is shown against a black background. This is a device borrowed from heraldry, an “exchange of colours” which predicts the future succession of power. In the same year, Cranach also created a crossword puzzle of a triptych on the theme of the Holy Kinship, with the electors of Saxony and the Emperor Maximilian all turning up in different corners to keep the Holy Family company while playing play out an elaborate narrative subtext concerning the need for peace and mutual loyalty.

Cranach’s gifts as painter-diplomat clearly endeared him to his Saxon masters and he continued, as principal painter to their court, until his death in 1553 at the venerable age of eighty one. In the course of his long life he also befriended Martin Luther. Not only did he paint several memorable portraits of Luther hiself – the present exhibition includes an outstandingly stern likeness, complete with brilliantly painted six-o-clock shadow – Cranach also became visual propagandist-in-chief to the German Reformation.

In a final twist to a remarkable career, albeit much compressed in the Sackler Wing’s modest five galleries, Cranach and his ever-expanding studio became a mass-production-line for the creation of distinctly risque female nudes. The doe-eyed Cranach girl, slender of hip, small of bust, coquettish through and through, appears in a dizzying variety of roles – many of them plainly designed to allow the artist’s patrons to ogle her while pretending to themselves that they were really thinking about classical myths or biblical legends. The girl, who is always the same girl, appears variously as Venus, Eve and, kinkily armed with a patently useless dagger, as the naked Lucretia in the throes of erotic-tragic agony. The artist ensured that his army of studio assistants always turned out essentially the same product, by simplifying his means, flattening out his contours, and eliminating most background detail. These might be formulaic works of art, but they are fascinating in their own right – evidence of the extent to which Cranach in his later years invented a knowingly tasteful, soft-porn brand.

It used to be a commonplace of art history that Cranach declined as he grew older. That now looks like a harsh judgement. It would be fairer to say that he began life as a firebrand and ended it as a smooth operator, creating equally engaging work in each incarnation. The fact that he died rich and famous – the  second richest man in Wittenberg, so it is said – should not be held against him.