On 7 June 2016 an exhibition devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder and his dynasty opens in the Winter Palace.
Opening the exhibition, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky welocomed Vadim Anatolyevich Sadkov, head of the Old Masters Department at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, who came up with the idea for the exhibition, and three private collectors who own works included in it. The Hermitage Director stated that this is a wonderful exhibition that tells about Cranach and about Protestantism that gave birth to Mannerism.
The display contains more than 80 paintings and works of graphic art not only by the Cranachs, but also by their studios and works connected with their name. They come from the stocks of the Hermitage and Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and also from museums in Nizhny Novgorod, Berlin, Madrid and Paris, and from private collections.
Lucas Cranach the Elder is among the chief masters of the German Renaissance, an artist who produced an enormous quantity of works, spanning all the great variety of themes and subjects of his time. Famed in his own lifetime, he still remains today a striking phenomenon that invariably attracts attention. He was born in 1472 in the town now called Kronach in Uppper Franconia in 1472, into the family of the artist Hans Maler. We do not know any of his youthful works; the earliest paintings and prints to have come down to us were created by him already at the age of 30, in Vienna. The few years that that he spent in that brilliant university city were to be very important for Cranach.
In the Viennese period of Cranach’s career, there is an appreciable typological kinship with his German predecessors, Jan Polack, Michael Wolgemut and Veit Stoss. His spiritualized landscapes, imbued with a mood of pantheism, laid the beginnings of the artistic tendency known as the Danube School. Some remarkable portraits date from this period, the finest of which are paired depictions of Johannes Cuspinian and his wife Anna Putsch (1502/03; Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur). Echoes of the Danube School’s pantheistic world-view can be detected in the painting Calvary (1515, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and the composition St Jerome in a Landscape (mid-1510s; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).
In 1505 Cranach entered the service of the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony in Wittenberg. For the next half-century, he remained a court artist to the rulers of Saxony. Specialists consider the year 1509 especially important in Cranach’s oeuvre. During it he created the large painting of Venus and Cupid (Hermitage). No-one before Cranach had ventured to depict the pagan goddess naked and full-length. This was a daring move, made under the influence of Italian Renaissance artists.
In this period an ideal of feminine beauty developed – that facial type that links all of Cranamch’s princesses, nymphs, Venuses, Lucretias and Virgin Marys. A heart-shaped face with a neat little chin, a slender nose, a small, precisely outlined mouth and very distinctive narrow, slightly slanting eyes. The features seen in Venus and Cupid can be found in the humble large-eyed face of Mary in the painting Virgin and Child with a Bunch of Grapes (Thyssen-Bornemissa Collection, Madrid). They are also present in the Virgin and Child with St Catherine and St Barbara, painted in 1512 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The 1514 painting Virgin and Child with John the Baptist (Uffizi, Florence), too, contains echoes of this ideal of female beauty.
In 1526 Cranach produced a portrait of Princess Sibylle of Cleves, the future Electress of Saxony, who became a regular model for the artist. Besides her actual portraits, she can also be recognized in the guise Judith, Venus and nymphs. Sibylle’s features can clearly be seen in the facial type of the 1526 Female Portrait and the Virgin and Child under the Apple-Tree (circa 1530; both in the State Hermitage).
While the artist approached his female personages to some general ideal type, his depictions of men are marked by great precision and individuality. The portraits that Cranach painted in his Wittenberg period initially had traces of the expressiveness characteristic of his Viennese works, as, for example, in the Portraits of John the Steadfast of Saxony and His Son John Frederick (National Gallery, London). But then Cranach’s “speaking” portraits quite rapidly gave way to courtly ones that were to some degree schematic. Many of them were reproduced in enormous numbers by his studio.
Cranach effectively created the iconography of one of the most famous people of his time – Martin Luther, a professor of Wittenberg University, with whom the artist was not merely acquainted, but shared a deep personal friendship. The exhibition includes paired portraits of Martin Luther and his close associate Philipp Melanchthon from Cranach’s studio (both from the State Hermitage).
Catholics as well as Lutherans commissioned works from Cranach, despite his Protestant convictions. The artist painted Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1495–1545) several times. The Hermitage portrait of 1526 is one of four surviving half-length depictions that repeat the same position of the head and facial expression.
Graphic works played a very important role in German Renaissance art. All the major artists of Dürer’s era apart from Matthias Grünewald produced prints and Lucas Cranach the Elder was no exception. Although graphic art did not occupy the central place in his oeuvre, the first years after his arrival in Wittenberg were exceptionally fruitful with regard to this technique. Cranach produced several woodcuts depicting the Electors’ favourite pastimes – tournaments and hunting. The exhibition includes the print Second Tournament (1509) that was one of a series of three woodcuts devoted to a tournament held in Wittenberg the year before. Cranach also used the woodcut technique when he turned to the theme of the end of Jesus’ earthly life. Cranach completed the series of Christ’s Passion in 1509, the most productive year for his graphic art. The Hermitage possesses an almost complete set of this series, lacking only The Lamentation. Of particular interest are the prints that have been tinted with gouache and watercolour. The Passion series was continued by the Martyrdoms of the Apostles cycle (1510–11) that is presented in its entirety in the exhibition. Also included, and being shown publically for the first time, are Lucas Cranach the Elder’s drawings of The Crucifixion (circa 1509–12) and The Mystic Betrothal of St Catherine (circa 1520) from the Hermitage collection. These two works were attributed in the process of preparing for the exhibition; before which they were considered anonymous. From the 1520s Cranach hardly produced any prints, handing this sphere of activity over almost completely to the artists of his studio.
After 1537, Cranach the Elder gradually began to withdraw from direct involvement in the work of his studio, handing over to his second son, the 22-year-old Lucas. At first Lucas Cranach the Younger reproduced his father’s works in a whole variety of genres. This is true of the painting Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery from the collection of the State Hermitage. Gradually he gave up replicating and found his own theme in painting. This artist often produced epitaph paintings, selecting the Resurrection for their subject. The Resurrection with the Donor’s Family (Epitaph for Michael Teuber) from the collection of Konstantin Mauergauz in Moscow is one of the most interesting works by Lucas Cranach the Younger. The influence of Netherlandish painting is detectable in the picture, noticeably in the presentation of the figure of Christ. The exhibition includes several works by Lucas the Younger – The Virgin and Child with a Bunch of Grapes (circa 1537, Konstantin Mauergauz collection) and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1530s, State Hermitage) – or his studio – Melanchthon on His Deathbed (State Hermitage) – that visitors will find interesting to compare with works by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The Cranachs’ studio continued to exists for around a century, with four generations of artists working in it. After the death of Lucas Cranach the Younger, it was headed by his son, Augustin Cranach, who in turn bequeathed it to Lucas Cranach III, about whose works nothing is known for certain.
The exhibition opening in the Hermitage was previously shown, with a somewhat different composition, in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
The exhibition curator is Maria Pavlovna Garlova, senior researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.
