Cranach reviewed by Timothy Hyman

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.