Viewing with a ‘Cranach eye’
By Alan Caine
21 March 2008

Lucas Cranach's The Golden Age

If your eyes have been schooled by Greek, Roman and Renaissance figures and spaces, it will be necessary to put that conditioning aside if you are to enjoy this fascinating exhibition. While the Renaissance leaned towards an ideal vision of humans and the grace of observed nature, Cranach's vocabulary is marked by knotted branches and brows, knuckles and rather small goddesses.

The first visual jolt meets us with a delicious array of colours and a frightening explosion of cloud and fire. The Martyrdom of St Catherine (1505) presents the saint kneeling in a low-cut velvet gown, quietly watching as the wheel on which she would have been tortured is miraculously destroyed. Behind her a tall aggressive man hovers with a sword. Plumed horses, armoured soldiers and dramatic landscape add to the grotesque and gripping violence. A crucifixion painting from the same period reveals utterly physical bodies on the crosses: one is meat-like, while Christ is bruised and bone-thin. But Cranach is not fully represented by these shocks. He was a major artist in his time, a court painter to the Electors of Saxony under three successive rulers, and the paintings at the Royal Academy show his breadth.

The Holy Kinship (1509) is a triptych with strong Italian undertones. The central panel contains Joseph, the Virgin Mary and St Anne with the Christ Child - plus two children playing on a tiled floor. Above, leaning on a balustrade, are figures of the three former husbands of St Anne. The image becomes more of a story than a devotional presence, and with the two step-sisters of Mary and their families on the side panels, kinship seems to displace conventional piety. This is the century of the Reformation, and the images are changing.

Cranach lived in Wittenberg and was a close friend of Martin Luther. An etching of Luther as an Augustinian monk and two portraits painted after his excommunication are of real interest. Cranach also worked for one of Luther's major opponents, Cardinal Albrecht. Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg as St Jerome in his study (1526) draws on a convention of portraying St Jerome in a room where ceiling, floor, side and back walls produce an enclosed, furnished space. A deer, a rabbit, a squirrel, a lion and some birds - his companions in the wilderness - are on the floor. The cardinal's robe and hat rest on a table. Jerome/Albrecht sits at a desk and is unobtrusive. The result, in modern terms, is "surreal" - it casts a strange spell.

Another secular image, An Allegory of Melancholy, is even more surreal, with clouds full of horses and witch-like figures in the background and a woman on a balcony with four children, a dog and a scattering of emblematic devices (orb, dividers, chisel, etc). A teasing image of unease.

Portraits are of very great interest throughout. Some are handsome, but others are more idiosyncratic, with shifting eyes and troubling countenances. He is, simply, a fine portrait painter. Look at your colleagues with a "Cranach eye". You will start by focusing on the eyes, noticing the shape and sheen of the eyeball, then the curve of the line which marks out the lid. Shade only slightly, and let line do the work as you catch the exact linear marks which define the lips of your subject. The nature of the way hair curls, the very specific outline of the jaw and chin and the geography of any significant folds of skin will produce a sharp likeness. Any costume will be dealt with in a similar manner. Lines of detail and decoration are not generalised but carefully observed, and colour will be used to bring out a fully decorated surface. The image will have a fine sense of finish, although the likeness appears not to flatter. Few portraits of this period give us a deep psychological study of the sitter, and we may be disappointed not to be able to see further into the "being" of Luther or Cardinal Albrecht or John the Steadfast, but we do have an artful image which exceeds any passport photo in recording a face.

Among his courtly paintings we find unclothed figures. Naked or nude? They carry neither the shock of having removed clothes nor the monumentality we often associate with "the nude". Lucretia (1532) reveals a delicately unclothed girl with an absolutely transparent veil, ready to pierce herself with a sword. Too slight to convey heavy tragedy, she becomes a vague echo. The Golden Age (c1530) is tapestry-like and reflects the decorative kind of landscape which Cranach does so well. Half a dozen naked figures dance in a ring around a central fruit tree. Two couples sit or recline on a flowered lawn, and one pair steps into a pond. Roses, grapes, cherries and animals in pairs can be found, almost embedded in the green lawn. Delicate abandon, perhaps, in this time of innocence.

It is clear from this exhibition that Cranach was an artist of real substance and ability, and indeed he was recognised as such in his own time. Much in his style reminds us of his contemporaries, including Altdorfer, Grünewald and Dürer. The exhibition does also have a significant historical dimension, but the drawing, colour and composition are the stuff of masterworks.