Lucas Cranach the Elder | Northern Renaissance painter

German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder was born at Kronach in upper Franconia.

His exact date of birth is unknown.

He learned the art of drawing from his father Hans Maler (his surname meaning "painter" and denoting his profession, not his ancestry, after the manner of the time and class).

His mother, with surname Hübner, died in 1491.

Later, the name of his birthplace was used for his surname, another custom of the times.

How Cranach was trained is not known, but it was probably with local south German masters, as with his contemporary Matthias Grünewald, who worked at Bamberg and Aschaffenburg (Bamberg is the capital of the diocese in which Kronach lies).

There are also suggestions that Cranach spent some time in Vienna around 1500.

According to Gunderam (the tutor of Cranach's children) Cranach demonstrated his talents as a painter before the close of the 15th century.

His work then drew the attention of Duke Friedrich III, Elector of Saxony, known as Frederick the Wise, who attached Cranach to his court in 1504.

The records of Wittenberg confirm Gunderam's statement to this extent that Cranach's name appears for the first time in the public accounts on the 24 June 1504, when he drew 50 gulden for the salary of half a year, as pictor ducalis ("the duke's painter").

Cranach was to remain in the service of the Elector and his successors for the rest of his life, although he was able to undertake other work.

Cranach married Barbara Brengbier, the daughter of a burgher of Gotha and also born there; she died at Wittenberg on 26 December 1540.

Cranach later owned a house at Gotha, but most likely he got to know Barbara near Wittenberg, where her family also owned a house, that later also belonged to Cranach.

Career

The first evidence of Cranach's skill as an artist comes in a picture dated 1504. Early in his career he was active in several branches of his profession: sometimes a decorative painter, more frequently producing portraits and altarpieces, woodcuts, engravings, and designing the coins for the electorate.

Early in the days of his official employment he startled his master's courtiers by the realism with which he painted still life, game and antlers on the walls of the country palaces at Coburg and Locha; his pictures of deer and wild boar were considered striking, and the duke fostered his passion for this form of art by taking him out to the hunting field, where he sketched "his grace" running the stag, or Duke John sticking a boar.

Before 1508 he had painted several altar-pieces for the Castle Church at Wittenberg in competition with Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair and others; the duke and his brother John were portrayed in various attitudes and a number of his best woodcuts and copper-plates were published.

In 1509 Cranach went to the Netherlands, and painted the Emperor Maximilian and the boy who afterwards became Emperor Charles V.

Until 1508 Cranach signed his works with his initials.

In that year the elector gave him the winged snake as an emblem, or Kleinod, which superseded the initials on his pictures after that date.

Cranach was the court painter to the electors of Saxony in Wittenberg, an area in the heart of the emerging Protestant faith.

His patrons were powerful supporters of Martin Luther, and Cranach used his art as a symbol of the new faith.

Cranach made numerous portraits of Luther, and provided woodcut illustrations for Luther's German translation of the Bible.

Somewhat later the duke conferred on him the monopoly of the sale of medicines at Wittenberg, and a printer's patent with exclusive privileges as to copyright in Bibles.

Cranach's presses were used by Martin Luther. His apothecary shop was open for centuries, and was only lost by fire in 1871.

Cranach, like his patron, was friendlywith the Protestant Reformers at a very early stage; yet it is difficult to fix the time of his first meeting with Martin Luther.

The oldest reference to Cranach in Luther's correspondence dates from 1520.

In a letter written from Worms in 1521, Luther calls him his "gossip", warmly alluding to his "Gevatterin", the artist's wife.

Cranach first made an engraving of Luther in 1520, when Luther was an Augustinian friar; five years later, Luther renounced his religious vows, and Cranach was present as a witness at the betrothal festival of Luther and Katharina von Bora.

He was also godfather to their first child, Johannes "Hans" Luther, born 1526.

In 1530 Luther lived at the citadel of Veste Coburg under the protection of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and his room is preserved there along with a painting of him.

The Dukes became noted collectors of Cranach's work, some of which remains in the family collection at Callenberg Castle.

The death in 1525 of the Elector Frederick the Wise and Elector John's in 1532 brought no change in Cranach's position; he remained a favourite with John Frederick I, under whom he twice (1531 and 1540) filled the office of burgomaster of Wittenberg.

In 1547, John Frederick was taken prisoner at the Battle of Mühlberg, and Wittenberg was besieged. As Cranach wrote from his house to the grand-master Albert, Duke of Prussia at Königsberg to tell him of John Frederick's capture, he showed his attachment by saying,

"I cannot conceal from your Grace that we have been robbed of our dear prince, who from his youth upwards has been a true prince to us, but God will help him out of prison, for the Kaiser is bold enough to revive the Papacy, which God will certainly not allow".

During the siege Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, remembered Cranach from his childhood and summoned him to his camp at Pistritz. Cranach came, and begged on his knees for kind treatment for Elector John Frederick.

Three years afterward, when all the dignitaries of the Empire met at Augsburg to receive commands from the emperor, and Titian came at Charles's bidding to paint King Philip II of Spain, John Frederick asked Cranach to visit the city; and here for a few months he stayed in the household of the captive elector, whom he afterward accompanied home in 1552.

He died at age 81 on October 16, 1553, at Weimar, where the house in which he lived still stands in the marketplace.

He was buried in the Jacobsfriedhof in Weimar.

Cranach had two sons, both artists: Hans Cranach, whose life is obscure and who died at Bologna in 1537; and Lucas Cranach the Younger, born in 1515, who died in 1586. He also had three daughters. One of them was Barbara Cranach, who died in 1569, married Christian Brück (Pontanus), and was an ancestor of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

His granddaughter married Polykarp Leyser the Elder, thus making him an ancestor of the Polykarp Leyser family of theologians.

Works and art

The oldest extant picture by Cranach is the Rest of the Virgin during the Flight into Egypt, of 1504. The painting already shows remarkable skill and grace, and the pine forest in the background shows a painter familiar with the mountain scenery of Thuringia. There is more forest gloom in landscapes of a later time.

Following the huge international success of Dürer's prints, other German artists, much more than Italian ones, devoted their talents to woodcuts and engravings.

This accounts for the comparative unproductiveness as painters of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, and also may explain why Cranach was not especially skilled at handling colour, light, and shade.

Constant attention to contour and to black and white, as an engraver, seems to have affected his sight; and he often outlined shapes in black rather than employing modelling and chiaroscuro.

The largest proportion of Cranach's output is of portraits, and it is chiefly thanks to him that we know what the German Reformers and their princely adherents looked like.

He painted not only Martin Luther himself but also Luther's wife, mother and father. He also depicted leading Catholics like Albert of Brandenburg, archbishop elector of Mainz, Anthony Granvelle and the Duke of Alva.

A dozen likenesses of Frederick III and his brother John are dated 1532.

It is characteristic of Cranach's prolific output, and a proof that he used a large workshop, that he received payment at Wittenberg in 1533 for "sixty pairs of portraits of the elector and his brother" on one day.

Inevitably the quality of such works is variable.

Religious subjects

Cranach's religious subjects reflect the development of the Protestant Reformation, and its attitudes to religious images.

In his early career, he painted several Madonnas; his first woodcut (1505) represents the Virgin and three saints in prayer before a crucifix.

Later on he painted the marriage of St. Catherine, a series of martyrdoms, and scenes from the Passion.

After 1517 he occasionally illustrated the old subjects, but he also gave expression to some of the thoughts of the Reformers, although his portraits of reformers were more common than paintings of religious scenes.

In a picture of 1518, where a dying man offers "his soul to God, his body to earth, and his worldly goods to his relations", the soul rises to meet the Trinity in heaven, and salvation is clearly shown to depend on faith and not on good works.

Other works of this period deal with sin and divine grace. One shows Adam sitting between John the Baptist and a prophet at the foot of a tree.

To the left God produces the tables of the law, Adam and Eve partake of the forbidden fruit, the brazen serpent is reared aloft, and punishment supervenes in the shape of death and the realm of Satan.

To the right, the Conception, Crucifixion and Resurrection symbolize redemption, and this is duly impressed on Adam by John the Baptist.

There are two examples of this composition in the galleries of Gotha and Prague, both of them dated 1529.

His workshop made an altarpiece with a Crucifixion scene in the centre which is now in the Kreuzkirche, Hanover.

Towards the end of his life, after Luther's initial hostility to large public religious images had softened, Cranach painted a number of "Lutheran altarpieces" of the Last Supper and other subjects, in which Christ was shown in a traditional manner, including a halo, but the apostles, without halos, were portraits of leading reformers.

He also produced a number of violent anti-Catholic propaganda prints, in a cruder style, directed against the Papacy and the Catholic clergy.

His best known work in this vein was a series of prints for the pamphlet Passional Christi und Antichristi, where scenes from the Passion of Christ were matched by a print mocking practices of the Catholic clergy, so that Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple was matched by the Pope, or Antichrist, signing indulgences over a table spread with cash.

One of his last works is the altarpiece, completed after his death by Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1555, for the Stadtkirche (city church) at Weimar.

The iconography is original and unusual: Christ is shown twice, to the left trampling on Death and Satan, to the right crucified, with blood flowing from the lance wound. John the Baptist points to the suffering Christ, whilst the blood-stream falls on the head of a portrait of Cranach, and Luther reads from his book the words, "The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin". | © Wikipedia

Il pittore ed incisore tedesco rinascimentale Lucas Cranach detto il Vecchio (Kronach, 1472 - Weimar, 16 ottobre 1553) iniziò la sua carriera con un apprendistato presso la bottega del padre incisore, con il quale collaborò fino al 1498.

Tra il 1501-1504 viaggiò lungo la valle del Danubio fino a Vienna, dove frequentò gli ambienti umanisti. In quegli anni dipinse delle tavole di ispirazione religiosa (San Girolamo 1502, Crocifissione 1503, Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto 1504) ed il ritratto di un umanista viennese, il dottor Cuspinian e sua moglie, nel 1504.

Durante questo periodo il suo stile, vicino a quello di Albrecht Dürer, di Albrecht Altdorfer e della Scuola danubiana (di cui fu peraltro uno dei protagonisti), si caratterizzò per la predominanza dei paesaggi movimentati, quasi surrealisti, per l'attenzione ai dettagli ed ai simboli, per un lirismo esacerbato, dove la tensione psicologica è palpabile, con spazi nei quali si inseriscono con armonia dei personaggi enigmatici.

Il banchetto di Erode, 1539, Kunsthistorisches Museum, che rappresenta la vicenda di Erode Antipa, Salomè e Giovanni Battista.

Si stabilì a Wittenberg nel 1505 diventando pittore dell'elettore di Sassonia Federico il Saggio, che lo rese nobile nel 1509.

A partire da questa data, la sua arte si orientò verso uno stile simile al manierismo: le forme si allungano, divengono più sottili, i personaggi acquistano importanza in rapporto al paesaggio diventato quasi una semplice decorazione e le loro differenti pose divengono più elaborate, con molta cura per l'abbigliamento raffinato.

A Wittenberg, in quel periodo, fece la conoscenza di Martin Lutero, con il quale instaurò un legame di amicizia testimoniato da numerosi ritratti.

Passato alle idee riformate, Cranach partecipò alla creazione dell'iconografia protestante, rappresentando temi cari alla Riforma, presi dall'Antico e dal Nuovo Testamento.

Dipinse anche numerosi ritratti e scene religiose che gli assicurarono la celebrità in tutta l'Europa e, a partire dal 1525, intensificò la sua produzione grazie all'aiuto dei figli Hans e Lucas, attivi nella bottega ben organizzata.

Fu lui ad illustrare con incisioni l'edizione della Bibbia in tedesco, tradotta da Lutero.

Proprietario di una farmacia e di una stamperia, fu eletto tre volte borgomastro di Wittenberg e conservò la sua carica pittorica anche sotto gli elettori Giovanni-Costante e Giovanni Federico I di Sassonia, per i quali dipinse dei nudi biblici e mitologici con un erotismo allusivo.

Essendo stato catturato il suo protettore Giovanni Federico dopo la Battaglia di Mühlberg, Cranach lo accompagnò in cattività dal 1550-1552, prima di ritornare a Weimar, nuova residenza elettorale, per morirvi l'anno seguente, dopo aver prodotto più di quattrocento opere.

Il suo arco stilistico spaziò dall'espressionismo delle prime opere fino a un grafismo intellettuale ed elegante, quasi astratto, della fase più tarda.

La sua tomba si trova sulla parete esterna della Jakobskirche.

Lucas Cranach il Giovane continuò l'attività del padre e del suo studio.