Spiritual surrender – Lucas Cranach the elder

Since the Romantic era, we have lived with the cliché that any artist worth his salt must be an unruly individualist, in rebellion against the moral and aesthetic constraints of a philistine world – a William Blake, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Francis Bacon. In that perspective, the notion of the painter as tradesman-entrepreneur, successful, respectable, organising his output on production-line principles and adapting both subject matter and style to the taste of the highest bidder, seems all wrong. But the gorgeous new show to open at the Royal Academy highlights the work of just such a shopkeeping genius.Lucas Cranach the elder was the great mythopoeic painter of the German Reformation. A close friend of Martin Luther, he more or less singlehandedly invented the visual vocabulary for Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic church. Cranach charted his friend’s evolution from wild-eyed monk to magisterial reformer in a stream of portrait prints and panel paintings. His mass-produced images made Luther’s the most familiar face in 16th-century Europe, and became the definitive icons of the new religion. And yet, at the height of his activity as Luther’s publicist, he was working equally hard on lucrative commissions from the most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic in Germany: Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, the very man whose blatant sale of indulgences had driven Luther to protest in the first place. Friendship, art and ideological purity were all very well, but for Cranach, business was business.

Nothing is known about his early life, though his background is suggested by his family name: Mahler, “painter”. He was born in Kronach, in Saxony, and adopted the name of his hometown to distinguish himself from other jobbing craftsmen. His early style would in any case have marked him out as special. When he first surfaces around 1500 in Vienna, Cranach was already a mature artist in his late 20s, whose work belonged to the same disturbing, imaginative world as Grünewald’s Eisenheim altarpiece. Tormented figures drawn with rapid, agitated strokes inhabit landscapes whose vivid natural features mimic the emotions of the human characters. Crucified bodies seem to emerge out of the wood of the crosses on which they writhe. Cranach’s intense colouring and detailed landscape backgrounds would inspire a new school of painters in the Danube region, but he moved away from this early work. While at Vienna, he also established himself as a portraitist, with a series of luminous paintings of distinguished Viennese academics and their wives. His sitters pose in idyllic landscapes filled with astrological symbolism, showing that the artist was absorbing the fashionable humanist learning then making its mark in the German universities.

In 1505, however, Cranach left the imperial capital to become court painter to the elector of Saxony, Prince Frederick the Wise. After Vienna, Frederick’s capital at Wittenberg must have seemed a provincial backwater, its 2,000 citizens squeezed into 400 houses within the city walls. But Wittenberg was on the up. A few years earlier, Frederick had founded a new university there and begun recruiting distinguished academic staff; he now recruited this talented young metropolitan painter to proclaim the wealth and sophistication of the Saxon court.

The work of a court painter was varied, but not always glamorous. Cranach and, soon, an extensive workshop of studio assistants were kept busy producing devotional paintings for the homes of the nobility, altarpieces and images of the saints for local parish churches, portraits of the electoral family and principal courtiers, many of them designed as gifts for Frederick’s friends and allies. Cranach rapidly evolved stereotyped likenesses of the elector and his family, which could be endlessly replicated by his assistants. But portraiture also produced some of his best work, especially his exquisitely sensitive portraits of the royal children, in which he captured with sympathy and affection their patent unease under the weight of their stiff court robes, and their nervous uncertainty about where to put their hands. … more>>