Why the sudden interest in Lucas Cranach? Having successfully avoided most
people’s attention for half a millennium, he seems to be popping up all over
the shop. Switch on the television drama Desperate Housewives, for instance,
and the first image in the opening credits is an animated version of his
Adam and Eve, successfully setting the slyly sexy tone for the suburban
shenanigans ahead. Then there was that amusing squall in a teapot recently
about a Cranach Venus that Transport for London refused to display on
Underground platforms because the poster was deemed inappropriate. This
cretinous decision, now reversed, was prompted by a shoddy piece of printing
that made it appear as if Venus was showing off her pubic hair and a sexy
cleft. She wasn’t. Her see-through veil had merely cast a suggestive shadow.
You need to wait until the middle of the 19th century, and Courbet, before
art dared to confront you with realistically painted pudenda.
It isn’t only into cheap media spotlights that Cranach has been thrust. The
serious art institutions are also fascinated by him. Last year, the
Courtauld Institute organised a wonderful little display devoted to his
naughty Adam and Eve. Now a full career overview at the Royal Academy seeks
to correct the two misconceptions that continue to circulate about our man:
that slyly sexy Venuses were his main subject; and that he was a greedy
churner-out of popular formats.
Max Friedländer, a regularly impressive German art historian who was rarely
wrong about anything, supplied the most withering assessment of Cranach as
far back as the 1930s, when he concluded, in his definitive tome on the
artist: “Had Cranach died in 1505, 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.” Ever since Friedländer
wrote that, the rest of us have believed it.
The Academy, in a terrific display of art-historical chutzpah, begs to differ.
And, because its show is arranged more or less chronologically, yet arrives
at Cranach’s Venuses only in its final room, the first misconception, that
sly nudes were his speciality, is easily corrected. The next accusation,
that he spent two-thirds of his career phoning it in, is so deeply embedded
that challenging it takes the length of the show.
Although Cranach was born in 1472, the earliest works we know by him were not
painted until he was about 30 years old. So, the first decade of his output
is still out there waiting to be discovered. Which means the opening
sighting we have of him here, a gory Crucifixion attended by a band of
voyeuristic Franconian nobles who’ve ridden in from the castle at the back,
is already the work of a thoroughly accomplished artist. No build-up. No
foreplay. And, just five years later, in 1505, he painted what many consider
his masterpiece: an action-packed imagining of The Martyrdom of St Catherine.
Because we live in godless times, I cannot assume you know the story. If you
don’t, this fireworks display of a painting may strike you as confusing.
There’s so much going on in it. Catherine was a beautiful princess from
Alexandria whose crime was to persuade 50 heathen philosophers to convert to
Christianity. She was sentenced to torture on a wheel studded with spikes,
but God destroyed this murderous wheel with a lightning bolt. There it is in
the background of Cranach’s frantic crowd scene, being blown apart by a
celestial bomb attack. The emperor Maxentius then ordered that Catherine be
beheaded instead. And that is the moment we are witnessing: her imminent
decapitation.
But look how inventively, and in how many happy directions, Cranach’s exciting
painting strays off its narrative path. What is that executioner wearing?
One of his legs sports a thigh-length boot, but the other does not. Half his
outfit is white, while the other half is covered in multicoloured stripes.
Look, too, at the mass of heaving bodies being blown up by the lightning.
What impossible positions they adopt. With a colour scheme unlike any other
of its times, and a cast of contortionists taking the bit parts, this great
and mysterious painting makes instantly clear that we are in the presence of
a Renaissance master with a spectacularly unique vision.
Cranach was from Kronach, in Franconia - a loaded stretch of Germany with
Nuremburg in it, and Bayreuth, that nowadays constitutes northern Bavaria.
This was also where his friend Martin Luther started Christianity’s big
civil war, and the region has never since been able to decide if it is
Catholic or Protestant. So it has zigzagged between the two positions, as,
indeed, did the art of Cranach.
The fantastical religious paintings that surround The Martyrdom of St
Catherine in the first outburst of his career confirm the impression that a
momentous and unruly talent has been unleashed. Familiar subjects - the
Crucifixion, the stigmatisation of St Francis - are reinvented outrageously
by an artist determined not to do anything the way others did it. If the
religious convolutions in the foregrounds are too complex for you, there are
always the backgrounds to enjoy. Cranach was a superb landscapist who always
set his biblical duels in recognisable stretches of Upper Franconia, where
tottering Harry Potter castles wobble atop mysterious riverside crags.
Because his imagination darted about so much, there wasn’t much he didn’t try.
There are portraits, altarpieces, bits of contemporary genre pictures that
tug your heartstrings and ones that make you laugh. His woodcuts throb and
squirm with events, like an angler’s worm tin. And a gorgeous nocturnal
Nativity sets him the tough task of painting candlelit reflections at night.
Nowhere does his art settle on a standard look.
I enjoyed, too, his sudden lurch into grotesqueness with a set of cruel
paintings mocking the union first of toothless old men with young girls,
then of toothless old women with young boys. Just when you think too many
tankards of sarcasm are being emptied into Cranach’s art, he switches tack
again with a series of noble portrait heads, produced in the unusual medium
of oil on paper, that prove what an astute recorder of character he was. The
young Luther, for one, stops being a famous name in a textbook and becomes a
strange-looking fellow with high cheekbones, tiny eyes and a fierce Oriental
cast to his features that promises lots of belligerence. Cranach never gives
you what you think you are going to get. Even as mundane a subject as a twin
portrayal of the apostles Peter and Paul turns into a battle of hairy
eccentrics, won easily by an unlikely St Peter, whose combed-over receding
hairline and scruffily twisted moustache give him the air of a recently
widowed pudding salesman.
Lots of Cranach’s art has a smile on its face. But it’s never a kind smile,
always a sarcastic and bitter one. The final room, where the Venuses are
gathered, and around which I urge the officials of Transport for London to
skulk with their magnifying glasses aloft, searching for clefts and pubic
hair - because they won’t find any - is as full of weird surprises as any
room that precedes it. By this time, Cranach is the head of a large and
successful studio. In worldly terms, he was among the most successful of all
Renaissance artists. Yet, even when his art appears to be mass-producing
sexy Venuses, it never actually repeats itself. Every Venus is different.
True, the surfaces are harder and slicker - Friedländer complained that the
late paintings made him think of chestnuts at conker time - but the
unexpected leaps of imagination continue to bring joy.
Look at the extraordinary figure of Mercury presiding over The Judgment of
Paris. Gnarled, grey-haired, bearded: he must be 70 if he’s a day. Where
else in art is Mercury a creaky 70-year-old?
Thus, a successfully revisionist show proves Cranach’s fizzling-out was
actually a redirection of his efforts. And that a giant has been mistaken
for a tiddler.
Cranach, Royal Academy, W1, until June 8
