Lucas Cranach, the Elder

Lucas Cranach, the Elder (born 1472, Cranach, bishopric of Bamberg [now Kronach, Germany]—died October 16, 1553, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar) was a leading painter of Saxony, and one of the most important and influential artists in 16th-century German art. Among his vast output of paintings and woodcuts, the most important are altarpieces, court portraits and portraits of the Protestant Reformers, and innumerable pictures of women—elongated female nudes and fashionably dressed ladies with titles from the Bible or mythology.

Life and career

Lucas Müller was born in a village approximately 55 miles (90 km) north of Nürnberg. Although only a year younger, he survived Albrecht Dürer, the great genius of German art, by 25 years and, in fact, outlived all the significant German artists of his time. Lucas’s teacher was his father, the painter Hans Müller, with whom he worked from 1495 to 1498. He is known to have been in Coburg in 1501, but the earliest of his works that have been preserved date from about 1502, when he was already 30 and living in Vienna. It was in that city that he dropped the surname of Müller, calling himself Cranach after his hometown, which is now spelled Kronach.

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In Vienna Cranach made an important contribution to the painting and illustrations of the Danube school, the art of the Austrian Danubian region around Vienna and other towns. In Vienna he also came in contact with the humanists teaching at the university and did portraits of the scholars Johannes Stephan Reuss (1503) and Johannes Cuspinian (c. 1502–03).

Presumably while Cranach was still in Vienna, he received news of his appointment as court painter to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony; he must already have been a famous artist, for he was given two and a half times the salary paid to his predecessor. In spring 1505 he arrived in Wittenberg, a university town on the Elbe River and seat of the electors, where he remained for 45 years, until 1550, as court painter. He became a prominent citizen, serving as a member of the town council in 1519–20 and as burgomaster three times in the years 1537–44. Through Cranach, who received important commissions from three successive electors and caused many young artists to come to Wittenberg, the town became an art centre.

The Protestant Reformation had begun in 1517 in Wittenberg with Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Cranach was on friendly terms with Luther, who had been a teacher at the University of Wittenberg since 1508. Cranach painted portraits of Luther, his wife, Katherina von Bora, and his parents. Through these and other portraits, he helped form today’s image of Luther’s circle. Indeed, apart from his other duties as court artist, Cranach became the chief pictorial propagandist of the Protestant cause in Germany, multiplying the images of the Reformers and the Protestant princes in innumerable painted, engraved, and woodcut portraits. The scope of this activity is indicated by a single payment in the electoral accounts (1533) for “sixty pairs of small paintings of the late Electors.” Cranach also did altarpieces and paintings for Lutheran churches. His works were sought after by Protestant and Roman Catholic patrons alike, and hundreds of pictures now in museums and private collections testify to his exceptional productivity. Aside from his paintings, there are more than 100 separate woodcuts by him.

Paintings

Cranach did not sign his works with his full name. The early ones, before 1504, were unsigned; from 1504 to 1506 his signature consisted of an entwined “LC”; from 1506 to 1509, it consisted of the separated initials “LC”; from 1509 to 1514, it consisted of these spaced initials and his coat of arms, the winged serpent, which became his sole signature in 1515. All works, even those that had issued from his large workshop or studio (in which he often employed 10 or more assistants), henceforth carried this device, which was also used by his son Lucas the Younger, until the latter’s death in 1586. This gave rise to many problems of attribution that still remain unsolved. The fact that so few works bear any date further complicates the establishment of a Cranach chronology.

It is certain, however, that Cranach’s style was fully formed and underwent little development after about 1515, and the highly finished, mass-produced paintings after that date suffer by comparison with the more individual works he painted in early adulthood. The paintings the 30-year-old artist did in Vienna were of a profoundly devotional kind set in the wild landscapes of the Alpine foothills, with ruins and windswept trees. These pictures show Cranach as an avant-garde artist of considerable emotional force, and one of the initiators of the Danube school. Notable among them are a Crucifixion (c. 1500) and St. Jerome in Penitence (1502).

The first decade of Cranach’s stay at Wittenberg was marked by a series of experiments in which he adapted his style to suit the demands of the Saxon court. The right wing of the St. Catherine Altarpiece (1506) already shows a radical break with his earlier style; there is exquisite detail in the realistic portrait heads, but courtly decorum has purged the scene of all emotion and given it a decorative bias, with strong emphasis on the patterns of dress. Following his visit to the Netherlands in 1508, Cranach experimented with Italo-Netherlandish ideas of spatial construction and with monumental nudes, but his true talent lay elsewhere, as is shown by the splendid full-length portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and Duchess Katharina von Mecklenburg (1514), which mark the establishment of his official portrait style. Here, space and volume are annihilated; magnificent clothes, set off by a featureless backdrop, are topped by faces reduced to their essential, typical features. Cranach was a pioneer of the frigid state portraiture of the 16th century, but he fell short of the icy reserve of his successors—Hans Holbein the Younger and Bronzino—because his abiding Gothic taste invariably led him to exaggerate a feature or elaborate a beard or dress for the sake of linear rhythms or calligraphic effects. With male sitters his method sometimes yields an image of startling power—e.g., the Portrait of Dr. J. Scheyring (1529). His female portraits are uniformly vapid, however.

The resurgence of Gothic linear rhythms is fundamental for the whole of Cranach’s later work, in which the borderline between sacred and mundane art is blurred. He represented female saints as beautiful and elegant ladies in fashionable dress and covered with jewelry. His Reclining River Nymph at the Fountain (1518) shows with what assurance he translated a Renaissance model—Giorgione’s Venus—into his personal language of linear arabesque. This work inaugurated a long series of paintings of Venus, Lucretia, the Graces, the judgment of Paris, and other subjects that serve as pretexts for the sensuous female nude, in which Cranach appears as a kind of 16th-century François Boucher. The naive elegance of these ladies, whose slender, sinuous bodies defy basic principles of anatomy, were clearly to the taste of the German courts and have an enduring charm. But in conception and style they look back to the International Gothic style of a century before. Thus from a historical viewpoint Cranach’s work was a backwater in European art of the 16th century. And though he was the dominant figure in the painting of northeastern Germany during his lifetime, his influence was confined to his immediate circle.

Cranach is called Pictor celerrimus (“swiftest of painters”) on his tombstone, and his contemporaries never ceased to marvel at the speed with which he worked. But this very speed also suggested the limitations of his art, for his strength lay not in reflection, composition, and construction but in an impulsive creativity that was nourished by his imagination and fancy, particularly in unheroic and idyllic scenes. His art was especially popular in that period of great political upheavals, perhaps because his contemporaries, who in public life were the protagonists of embattled ideologies, yearned for beauty in man and in nature and for a peaceful refuge from the world’s turmoil.

Both of Cranach’s sons were members of his studio. The elder, Hans Cranach, who died in 1537, left a few signed works that are indistinguishable in style from those of his father. Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–86), whose part in the joint production of the studio became important from about 1545, continued to work in the family style long after his father’s death in 1553.