Cranach, at the Royal Academy of Arts, opens with a bang – or, more precisely,
a thunderbolt: the miraculous shattering of St Catherine’s wheel in a seldom
seen early masterpiece from the Raday Library of the Hungarian Reformed
Church in Budapest. The jagged fire-from-heaven recalls Dürer’s Apocalypse
woodcuts, but re-created with a viscous painterliness. Close-to, the figures
in the overturned crowd are, puzzlingly, speckled with little grey patches,
which at first sight seem to be surface damage, until they resolve
themselves as grubby flakes – fallout from the explosion – scattered by the
artist’s brush. In the foreground time zone, flake-free, the décolleté
princess is about to be beheaded by an ogre-executioner, decked out in
gorgeous skintight motley. Beyond, a cloud-capped city on a rock rises from
the surrounding forest, the landscape that will reappear again and again
throughout Lucas Cranach’s art.
“The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine” is the culmination of the painter’s Vienna
years, the Sturm und Drang period often regarded as evidence of a brilliant,
though never quite fulfilled, promise. Born in 1472, Cranach was already in
his thirties by the time he painted “The Martyrdom”, and we know almost
nothing of his previous training. His father was a painter in the small town
of Kronach, near Bamberg; Lucas, it has been suggested, may have worked in
Cracow, where the Nuremberg sculptor Veit Stoss needed painters for his
great polychrome altarpiece. Arriving in Vienna around 1500, he seems to
have attracted distinguished patrons. “The Crucifixion” (characterized by
Otto Benesch as “small in size, great in spirit”) is crammed almost to
excess with energy and invention; the overall effect is uncouth, weird.
Christ bleeds at the ear, nose and mouth, while the thieves’ swollen bellies
echo the swags of cloud. In the dark tilted foreground, a dog spotted with
sores nibbles at a very long leg bone, rotten flesh still attached. On the
further wall, behind St Valentine, an epileptic goes into convulsions, and
an almost imbecilic Francis raptly receives the stigmata. Such lurid images
would provide one foundation for the ecstatic art of Albrecht Altdorfer and
Wolf Huber. But Cranach himself, based for the next forty years in the Saxon
court of Wittenberg, would tread a very different path.
The exhibition at the Royal Academy is a much reduced version of the
definitive Frankfurt retrospective whose excellent catalogue sets out to
present him as – in Bodo Brinkmann’s phrase – a “serial painter”, with long,
telling sequences of Saint Jeromes or Adams-and-Eves or Luther-portraits or
Ill-Matched-Couples, here glimpsed only in ones and twos. Quite soon after
arriving in Wittenberg, he seems to have developed a highly efficient
picture factory; even today, more than a thousand panels survive. At the
Royal Academy, Cranach may not immediately come across as an artist of great
stature or depth. There is the perennial problem of Norman Foster’s Sackler
Galleries, so flattering to works on paper, but so oddly diminishing to
paintings, especially when crammed closely together. But there is also a
special note struck by Cranach in his mature work, a deliberate
depthlessness, a slightly heartless wit, a steely clarity and economy. These
were the qualities that so appealed to German artists in the years after
1918, who reacted against excessive emotionality, and sought a new
Sachlichkeit – a factuality or objectivity. The cooling of Cranach may lead
us to underestimate this very original and distinctive artist.
The transitional work in this show is also the largest – the courtly
confection catalogued here as “Triptych with the Holy Kinship” (1509), in
which the family of the Christ child is somehow conflated with the family of
Cranach’s master, the Elector Frederick III of Saxony. The opulent palace
setting reflects the new Italianate fashions that were then invading
Northern Europe – the half-digested or “corrupt” classical architecture
Cranach must have seen when he visited the Netherlands a year earlier. At
Wittenberg, his predecessor as court painter was the maverick Venetian,
Jacopo de’ Barbari; and according to some scholars, Cranach himself crossed
the Alps into Venice and Bologna, in the same year he painted “The Holy
Kinship”. In Frankfurt, the curators found room for his two very close
imitations of sickly Perugino Madonnas. The flowering of German
sixteenth-century painting is partly a High Renaissance hybrid. But, by the
1520s Cranach had developed a stylistic starkness, most evident in his
portraits, that can appear almost “primitive”, or else very “modern”.
In Wittenberg – described by a contemporary as lying “on the frontiers of
civilization”, and with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants – Cranach would quickly
rise to leading citizen, and eventually to three-times mayor. Around 1510,
he began a friendship with a young theologian at the new university, the
Augustinian monk Martin Luther. After 1517, as Luther became first a
fugitive (we see the portrait of him here, in his bearded disguise as
“Junker Jörg”) and then the centre of a great European convulsion, painter
and prophet continued in small-town intimacy. It was Cranach who published,
at Wittenberg in 1522, Luther’s German New Testament; who stood witness to
the apostate’s marriage to a runaway nun; who recorded in the two beautiful
wrinkled portrait heads, here, Luther’s elderly parents. Leaving aside any
doctrinal images, it is in Cranach’s populist and vernacular bias, his
rejection of the Latinate in favour of some more indigenous idiom, that his
art might be seen as “Lutheran”.
One of the most surprising, and memorable, of all the works in this exhibition
is the superb watercolour “Head of a Peasant from Basle”. Red-eyed, creased,
weather-beaten, this extraordinarily moving, stoical face is brushed in with
a matchless sympathy. Discovered only in the 1930s, it must rank among the
greatest “realist” drawings of all time – the true heir to Hugo Van der
Goes, and, in its commanding precision, the forebear of Holbein. It has been
suggested that all Cranach’s portraits began with an on-the-spot close
watercolour scrutiny of this kind, only to be subjected to an extreme
stylization, a rebuilding of the face as icon, far removed from any
perceptual subtleties. The Cranach portrait formula allowed for workshop
reproduction in great numbers – hundreds, probably, in the case of Luther.
But his seizure of the unique individual physiognomy, set always against a
strong flat colour, goes beyond any merely caricatural reduction. The Basle
drawing helps establish the brilliant intelligence that lies behind his
rhetoric of simplicity.
The same wit shines out in Cranach’s most famous contribution to world art,
his almost laughable female nudes. The catalogue traces their origins in
humanist circles, in Dürer and in works by Giorgione, Titian and Lorenzo di
Credi, which Cranach may have encountered in Italy. But the synthetic being
who first appears in the artist’s fifties, with her protruding tummy and
rubber thighs, is an utterly unclassical conception of the human body.
Sometimes she is cast as a forest-aboriginal, in that imagery of a naked
Golden Age which usually signals – as in Matisse’s “Dance” – the living hope
of future liberty. But often, whether she is named Eve or Diana or Salome,
Cranach’s Woman wears the same conniving expression, of sweetness and
cruelty commingled. The marvellous Frankfurt “Venus” (who currently lurks
some seven foot high in the tunnels of the London Underground) turns out to
be a very small picture; but she has a cosmic presence. She stands on the
curved rim of our world, spread out against the black night, an immense
dream-personification, perhaps not so much of Beauty, as of Temptation. Her
gesture is enigmatic (is her final veil being held up, or is it about to be
discarded?) and her striptease, like Salome’s, seems certain to be followed
by a beheading.
In the frontispiece to this catalogue, Cranach depicts himself as an armoured
spear-carrier, staring out, adjacent to the spurting neck of the headless
Baptist, and a small dog lapping at the blood. Shall we call him the
Executioner’s Assistant, the Servant of Salome? Painted for a Polish bishop
in 1515 (the same year that Grünewald completed the Isenheim Altarpiece),
the image reads here as a final courtly nod to that vein of gory apocalyptic
horror that had so dominated German painting around 1500. In the year after
the Peasants’ War, Cranach elevated Luther’s most relentless Catholic
opponent, Cardinal Albrecht, to the role of Saint Jerome. At work in his
quiet study (he’s probably translating his rival Catholic version of the
German Bible, published the following year), Albrecht/Jerome has a menagerie
– not just the familiar lion, but a badger, a squirrel, a deer. Is this a
symbolism of the Peaceable Kingdom, or have the animals been imported from
“Adam Naming the Beasts” for yet another workshop variant?
Brinkmann praises Cranach as “no lonely genius . . . but a painter living at
the centre of things who knew how to combine productivity and quality and so
achieve economic success”. Warhol is here invoked; it could as easily have
been the Young British Artists, once similarly complimented by Michael
Craig-Martin for being “at home in the Post-Modern World”. For all Cranach’s
charm of imagery, his later work does often betray a glib completeness in
the ready-made forms that doesn’t repay long or repeated looking. But the
Royal Academy’s exhibition remains a great treat, and the catalogue, with
its stunning double-spread details, a revelation.
CRANACH
Royal Academy of Arts
Bodo Brinkmann, editor
CRANACH
400pp. Royal Academy of Arts. £40.
978 1 90571 113 0
Timothy Hyman won last year's National Portrait Gallery/BP Travel
Award.
