Lucas Cranach E-Book

Teresa Präauer

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: A - Z Reihe
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 50

Beschreibung

Lucas Cranach the Elder created around 500 works during his lifetime. With his portraits of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton and as court painter to Frederick the Wise, he became one of the most sought-after painters of the Reformation. At the same time, Cranach was the first to translate the Italian Renaissance tradition of the life-size nude into art north of the Alps; his lascivious, barely veiled depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, bears witness to this. On the occasion of the large Cranach exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Austrian writer Teresa Präauer explores the work of this busy prince of painters from A to Z.

Leseprobe

Cranach

A–Z

Cranach

A–Z

Teresa Präauer

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

A → Ah, Cranach!

B → Bust of a Painter

C → Cranach Who?

D → Donors and Patrons

E → Eve

F → Force

G → Glad rags

H → Harpy

I → Instagrammability

J → Juvenescence

K → “Kassel” Brown

L → Luther

M → Monsters

N → Not the star

O → Ornament

P → Picasso

Q → Quire

R → Ruse

S → Scrapbook

T → Threat

U → Unsolved Mysteries

V → Venus

W → Website

XY → X-RaY

Z → Zooming in

A → Ah, Cranach!

The Golden Age ca. 1530

Wood 73.5 × 105.5 cm

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen,

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

I would like to begin with this exclamation—“Ah, Cranach!” For often have I stood in front of Cranach’s paintings and sighed “Cranach!” That “Ah!” is prompted by the joy of looking at a painting. There are people—and my readers are bound to be among them—who are truly greedy for paintings. They seek in them both beauty and ugliness, an irritation of conventional seeing habits. We want to know the history of the paintings and learn the stories in and behind these paintings. Their colors, lines, and patterns, the hands and the eyes, the space in them, and the frame that encompasses the painting.

What I like so much about Cranach is his pictorial language. Particularly that of the many little naked men and women, who are painted so smoothly and look a little like wax figures. They swim, they dance through the Garden of Eden, they contort their limbs, curl their fingers. Often animals are placed beside them, ducking under a bush or peering out from behind a tree. The animals have round, gleaming eyes, while the people often have almond eyes, a mild smile on their narrow lips. Today this smile might appear distant or even ironic to us. For me that is what constitutes the gentle humor in Cranach’s paintings, whether or not the painter intended it that way. I can’t help grinning when I look at that smile. That’s why I love Cranach’s paintings. Over the next few pages there will be a few things to be said about his figures, motifs, themes, and materials. Ah, Cranach!

B → Bust of a Painter

Lucas Cranach the Younger

Portrait of Lucas Cranach the Elder at Age 77

1550

Mixed media on wood 64 × 49 cm

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

A bust or half-length portrait shows a head and torso: only part of the sitter is shown, the rest is a mystery. The same applies to the painter Cranach. His first works can be dated to around 1500, by which time he was just thirty years old. Where had he lived before that, and what paintings had he made?

Lucas Cranach painted the Crucifixion and the first portraits known to us in Vienna which, with 20,000 inhabitants, was at the time one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire and a center of early humanism. It was a time of transition: in following on from classical traditions, the Renaissance strove to break with the Middle Ages.

Lucas Cranach the Elder was born in 1472 in the Franconian town of Kronach. He learned the trade from his father Hans Möller and became a wandering apprentice. From this time on he chose the surname Cranach and signed his paintings with the initials “LC.” Leaving one’s place of origin meant choosing a new name—many artists continue to do the same today: the conductor Franz Welser-Möst is a Möst from Wels, the painter Christian Ludwig Attersee spent his youth on Lake Atter, and the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle—well no, apparently, that’s the name she was born with.

The artistic profession as we know it today, and the self-image that went with it, were already beginning to form in Cranach’s time. Henceforth it would no longer be the craft of the medieval picture-maker that occupied the center ground, but the culture and talents of the Renaissance man. In the portrait—a new type of painting—the commissioning patrons from an influential social class, the merchants and burghers of a city, are reflected. In a self-portrait the artist shows and questions himself as an individual.

Self-portraits of Cranach exist only as details within groups of figures. Probably the best-known portrait was painted on wood by his son Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1550. It shows his father, already aged seventy-seven, with a full white beard. Over his light-colored shirt he wears a black schaube—a wide-sleeved cloak which, with the beret, was considered essential humanist clothing. Cranach looks directly at us, and we gaze with admiration at the hands of a painter—they have painted thousands of pictures.

C → Cranach Who?

Detail with signature from Johann the Constant 1532

Mixed media on wood 13.1 × 12.4 cm

Private collection

Detail with signature from Lucas Cranach the Younger

Raising of Lazarus (Meyenburg Epitaph) 1558

Oil on wood 230 × 200 cm