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Images for an iconoclastic age
Pamela Tudor-Craig reflects on Cranach’s relationship with the Reformation
 Extended Holy Family: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Triptych with the Holy Kinship, 1509. On loan to the Royal Academy from the Städel Museum, Frankfurt-am-Main© JOCHEN BEYER, VILLAGE-NEUF |
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LUCAS CRANACH the Elder (c.1472-1553) painted a bewitching Venus, who demonstrates an ideal of feminine proportions — small torso, narrow waist, and fecund belly — identified by Kenneth Clark as “northern” (although Botticelli adhered to it), in contrast with the classic proportions of the Venus de Milo represented by the Italian school. The painting now at the Royal Academy is petite; but his workshop could supply her in the large economy size as well. It is no good talking here about innocence and the Renaissance ideal of the naked truth. Some glances and some gestures are of timeless significance. Cranach gives her a contrasting pendant: Lucrezia, representing true love and innocence, wails as she is about to stab herself because she has been violated. All this comes from the man who, with Dürer and Holbein, created the visual language of the Reformation. His brush and printing press brought its message to countless thousands. The two men who did most to split the Church at the Reformation both had problems over their relationships with women. Cranach stood best man at the defiant marriage of Martin Luther, previously Augustinian monk and priest, to Katherina von Bora, previously Cistercian nun, on 13 June 1525. Two years later, Henry VIII began his six-year quest for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Of those three artists who have given a face to Protestantism, Dürer reflected the turmoil that preceded it in his Apocalypse prints, visualising the nightmares of Savonarola’s preaching. In his stoic Knight, Death and the Devil of 1513, he reflected Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani of a decade before. He presented his two panels of four apostles to Munich in 1526, since the altarpiece of the Virgin and Child, whose wings they should have been, could no longer be completed. Holbein’s personal life was torn to pieces by the Reformation: witness the tragic portrait of the weeping wife and pale and sickly children he would leave behind when he fled for the second and final time to England in 1532. Cranach’s Venus comes from that same year: only Cranach rode the storm with no dent in his range of imagery or in his ever-swelling pocket. Subject-matter no longer acceptable on Protestant ground was still in demand in Saxony. All three artists were outstanding for their powers of portraiture — the essence of the individualism that Protestantism proclaimed. To Cranach we owe many and convincing accounts of the appearance of Luther, two of them in this exhibition. He also recorded the more aesthetic appearance of Luther’s chief follower, Philip Melancthon. There is a jewel-like pair of portraits of them together by him in the Uffizi, and, through prints supplied by his press, their faces became generally familiar. The emergence of images of the Reformers led to an unforeseen crisis of confidence among some, at least, of their followers. In 1550, Christopher Hales wrote from London to Rudolph Gualter in Zurich to ask for portraits of Zwingli, Pellican, Bullinger, Johannes Oecolampadius, and himself “of the same size as the others”. In this company, “others” must have included Luther and Melancthon. Nine months later, Hales told Bullinger that Gualter had had the pictures painted, but kept four of them back “because there is some danger lest a door shall hereafter be opened to idolatry”. Hales protested that he wanted the portraits “both as an ornament to my library, and that your effigies might be beheld, as in a mirror, by those who by reason of distance, are prevented from beholding you in person. This is not done, excellent sir, with a view of making idols of you. . .” Such was the theoretical abhorrence of icons, however, and the avalanche of destruction to which it led, that Protestantism believed that even Christ must not be shown full face, gazing at the observer. He must be engaged in an incident from the Gospels. To this new requirement, Cranach contributes a deliberately overcrowded image of Christ blessing the infants, somewhat to the dismay of the apostles behind him. The picture has been lent, as have many important loans, from the Städel Museum at Frankfurt am Main. Such is the chaos shown here that the baby on which Christ has placed his right hand appears to have no motherly arm to support it, and, were it not for an unstudied miracle, must crash to the ground. There are too many martyrdom scenes in this exhibition for my taste, and too much interest in gore altogether, whether the excuse be the treachery of women to excuse harping on the beheading of the Baptist, or edification at the calm of St Catherine in the split second before she loses her head. Cranach, for all his enduring and close friendship with Luther, appears to have had no problems about working for Luther’s chief opponent, Cardinal Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz.Christopher Hales wanted portraits of Reformers for his library. In 1550, libraries were still a novelty in gentlemen’s houses. The Renaissance in Venice had seen a number of pictures of St Jerome composing the Vulgate (probably in a rocky desert and with the assistance only of his lion and his cardinal’s hat), which would have adorned the first Neoplatonic libraries. Now Cardinal Albrecht has to pose, in a composition heavily dependent on Dürer’s print of St Jerome in his study, working on his translation of the Vulgate into German. |
 Mother of Constantine: St Helena with the True Cross, 1525, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, on loan to the Royal Academy from the Cincinnati Art Museum (bequest of Mary E. Emery) |
| This composition, lent by the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, is one of the most attractive pictures at the Academy. The Archbishop has turned for reference not to a humanist library, but to a menagerie of symbolic beasts. The irony of this, in an exhibition shot through with ironies, is that the Cardinal is redrafting his reply to Luther’s translation of the New Testament into the vernacular, which had been printed by Cranach in 1522. This and the printing of Luther’s many pamphlets, and, above all, of the Passional of Christ and AntiChrist of 1521, where Cranach collaborated with Melancthon, provided the essential and widely disseminated visual tools of the Reformation. A pair of prints contrasting, for example, the Pope’s feet being kissed with Christ’s washing the disciples’ feet spoke as clearly as, and even more widely than, the Reformers’ sermons. What are we to make of a further departure stemming from Cranach and his school: the biblical painting, be its subject the baptism of Christ or, nearer the nub, the Last Supper itself, where the apostles are recognisably played by the Reformers and their protectors? A pre-schism (1509) prototype of this idea, which has its source in late-medieval miniatures where a patron or patroness, such as Margaret of York, may kneel in place of the Magdalen before the resurrected Christ, is one of the most accessible pictures in this exhibition. The subject of the Heilige Sippe, or extended Holy Family, had been popular across northern Europe for half a century: witness a side altarpiece at Ranworth. In the days before Luther tore the fabric of the Western Church, Cranach was working for the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. He and his brother John are recognisable in this grand altarpiece posing as two of the Virgin Mary’s mother’s previous husbands, while the Emperor Maximilian himself poses as father. (This perhaps surprising family tree was devised to account for Christ’s extended family, and for the six apostles who claimed relationship with him.) The six children, sons of the Virgin Mary’s half-sisters, gambol across the foreground. In the centre, Joachim leans over the balcony to regard his wife Anna (whose third husband he was) playing with the Virgin and the infant Christ, who takes up a pose already established by Leonardo in The Virgin and the Yardwinder, accompanied by Joseph, as usual asleep. The most original passage in this delightful composition is the right wing, where one of the little boys is having his head examined for nits by his mother, one of the Marys. His little brother is wrapping himself up in his mother’s sumptuous gold-brocade gown. Father sits at the window behind them, ostensibly studying a large book. His eye has strayed, however, from the page to the domestic scene before him. He regards it with such affectionate attention that we may imagine that Lucas Cranach, for all his capacity to put business first in a society where many lost their lives for their ideals, was a happy family man. This exhibition is far from comprehensive, though I doubt whether more pictures would have futher enhanced our understanding of Cranach as an artist. The most significant of his images, and those that touch on the so-familiar crisis of his time, are here. A few of them are beautiful. All are dazzlingly competent. He did not invent compositions if Dürer had done it for him, but, in his day, artists had to strike out beyond the long-established formulae. This is a highly intelligent and apposite exhibition. It will fascinate. “Cranach” is at the Royal Academy (Sackler Wing), Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1, until 8 June. Phone 020 7300 8000. www.royalacademy.org.uk |
