The Royal Academy is hosting the new Cranach Paintings Exhibition and the catalogue lists and illustrates 125 exhibits, of which most are paintings, some in matched pairs, 106 in all.Of these, 47 that were shown in Frankfurt are not included in the Academy’s version of the exhibition,and no-one seems to know why-unless they have been stolen or are missing in between exhibitions. Eleven drawings are also absent, so too the sketchbook-cum-album amicorum that gives us the only clear insight into the work and personality of young
Hans Cranach.The whole exhibition has been reduced by two-fifths, the exhibition is gravely impoverished : a number of direct comparisons that its catalogue proposes cannot be made, we are no clearer in the Cranach-not-Cranach debate at any stage of his very long activity and, since no painting is quite certainly dateable before 1502 when he was 30. Also we still have not the slightest idea of how the development of the elder Lucas began, nor what an early work might look like.
Konrad Celtis, celebrated German humanist a decade or so older than Cranach, founder of learned societies from the valley of the Rhine to Kraków, a startlingly erotic poet and a wanderer from princely courts to that of the Holy Roman Emperor, deplored what he saw as Germany’s neglect of the liberal arts and damned it for its “drunkenness, barbarism, cruelty and everything that is bestial and foolish”. These, however, are in large measure what Cranach reflects in his paintings, yet the propaganda associated with the exhibition seeks to rehabilitate him, to rescue him from his long-standing reputation as the master of a factory mass producing replicas and variants of his original ideas, and to promote him as a discreet genius capable of creating a new visual language that fused the traditions of central Europe north of the Alps with those of the Italian Renaissance, a German Zeuxis for German courts as cultivated as those of the dukes of Italy. Cranach, we are told, is to be seen, not only as the Raphael, the Parmigianino, the Correggio of the larger Germany, but as a humanist, a classicist, and a brilliant intellectual who could with ease tread the tightrope between the militant new Protestantism of Luther, his friend, and the traditional Catholicism of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, his most constant patron Cranach profited mightily from both. Every Protestant of means and influence wanted a portrait of Luther, and in his position as court painter in Wittenberg to three successive Saxon Electors, he was so ideally placed to initiate and receive hundreds of commissions that he became, de facto, the official painter of Luther as monk, in disguise as Junker Jörg, as Doctor of Theology, and as plain Luther, husband of an erstwhile nun. For the Cardinal he painted altarpieces and pictures that flattered him as St Jerome. And for the court he turned to erotica.
If Cranach is known at all to a wider English public than those few of us who enjoy prowling round provincial German art galleries, it is as a painter of scrawny female nudes, occasionally wisped about in veils, occasionally wearing My Fair Lady hats, pretending to be Venus, Diana, Lucretia and other mythological figures with an excuse for nakedness. As with all pornography, they conform to an artificial ideal of beauty or what is sexually attractive. I doubt if Cranach ever drew a nude woman, but he seems to have known just enough of anatomy to create a creature of erogenous zones, of nipples, breasts, wasp-waists and buttocks topped by the fashionable face and knowing look with which to trigger excitement in the cod-pieces of the barbarous German aristocracy, but though some are exquisitely painted, they are cold little fish with nothing of the warm sensuality of Titian or Correggio. This chill erotic quality spills over into less secular subjects, into the Eves of Eden and even into such figures fully-clothed as Salome with the Baptist’s Head, Lot’s daughters readying him for incest, the virtuous Bathsheba and Judith and, most suspect of all, his St Helena, a harlot with her arm about the cross. As for Cranach’s personification of Charity, the greatest of the Theological Virtues — far from giving the image “a new spiritual meaning” (as the catalogue has it), he has converted this ecclesiastical icon into a provocatively sensual image of fecundity and yet another naked woman with knowing look. Painted in 1534, it anticipates the disturbing qualities ofthe kiss in Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid (in the National Gallery), painted a decade or so later. That picture, no matter how unpleasant we may find it, is a masterpiece; Cranach’s is inept provincial smut. Inept is the word too for Cranach’s Golden Age. Given c1530 as its date, Cranach at 60 or so hardly offers us “a prime example of the inventive spirit” claimed by the writer of the catalogue entry. Woven into a steeply rising tapestry of flowers, shrubs and trees are a dozen naked figures, dancing, reclining, whispering sweet nothings over grapes that are the attribute of Bacchus, and splashing each other in a stream: a Golden Age of idleness set safely in a walled garden in which the lion lies with, if not the calf of Isaiah’s prophecy, a pair of fawns. It should be idyllic, but the critical eye sees only a creaking composition of stiff and stilted poses, awkwardly and unconvincingly strung across the foreground plane, a climbing perspective so steep that, instead of a continuous landscape reaching far into the distance, we have a tilted stage and a backdrop of mountains peeping over the clumsy garden wall with which Cranach conceals his inability to construct and control a logical pictorial space when he cannot enlist the help of linear perspective. The fawns and the parent deer are beautiful and obviously based on studies from the life; the landscape elements too suggest immediate observation (and pictorial adjustment), but the figures are a laboured compilation of inflexible workshop templates.
Could Cranach have studied the naked male? Could? Yes, easily in the all male context of the painter’s workshop. But did he? A tiny panel of Hercules lifting Antaeus, of the same period, suggests not, so absurd is the anatomy, but the catalogue entry, without further comment on the matter, instructs us not to ignore “the sexual connotation of this highly intimate embrace (penis to penis) between two completely naked men”. Does the writer know something of workshop behaviour or courtly Saxon patronage that justifies this exhortation? All in all this is an unsatisfactory exhibition: perhaps it worked better in Frankfurt, but at the Academy, savagely cut back, it is hung in such a way that those who know nothing of Cranach’s stylistic development will continue to know nothing. I found myself constantly questioning the estimated dates and the implied authenticity — implied very simply by not raising the matter in extended catalogue entries more concerned with explaining imagery than the ’tis, ’tisn’t question of who painted a particular picture; their opinions on all other matters of Cranach connoisseurship are, perhaps, as worthless. Among the early paintings The Schotten Crucifixion is in very damaged state and extensively repaired, but where it more or less survives it seems technically alien to other paintings of the same supposed period, and in mood, almost a caricature of a Cranach; is it not a feeble copy by a weak hand rather than the earliest surviving authentic work at the age of 30? How could he, in only two years, reach from the cramped simplicities of this composition to the crowded but clear complexities of the two woodcut Crucifixions of 1502 (one not exhibited) and then, within three years or so, produce a painting as large, complex, densely crowded and spectacular as The Martyrdom of St Catherine from Budapest? This undoubted masterpiece is one of the few paintings in the exhibition that we can safely use as a benchmark of Cranach’s quality as draughtsman, painter, inventor of grotesque and violent motifs and characteristic physical types. With an estimated quarter century between them, the fallen soldier on the right is a spectacular precursor of the lifted Antaeus. Another indisputable benchmark is the triptych of The Holy Kinship, signed and dated 1509, a remarkable exercise in linear perspective and didactic purpose, promoting as scripture the legend that St Anne married three times, bearing to each husband a daughter named Mary, the eldest the mother of Christ, the others of, between them, six disciples. The Kinship has little to support it in the New Testament, but, though apocryphal, it had much support in northern Europe; here it is a roman à clef, of Saxon court portraiture and loyalties and one must ask who could have been responsible for so political an underlying programme — a courtly priest or humanist perhaps, but surely not Cranach himself ? And over which altar, and where, might this almost secular triptych have been placed?
This lazy exhibition asks and answers too few questions about a prolific painter whose signatures often signify nothing. Do the very slight Italian influences in the early work suggest an unreceptive response to an Italian Wanderjahr? In the autumn of 1508 Cranach was briefly in the Netherlands on a diplomatic errand, and the influence of Quentin Matsys is evident in The Holy Kinship and some slight softening of outlines and contours in some smaller pictures. Otherwise he remained resolutely within the German tradition, affected only by Dürer from his own generation. To measure the man we must remove him from the German context and compare him with such other contemporaries as Titian, Raphael, Correggio and Parmigianino, in a land where a real Renaissance was taking place — then we see how small he was, how parochial and primitive.
Cranach is at the Royal Academy ( 020 7300 8000 ) until 8 June. Daily 10am-6pm (Friday until 10pm).
Admission £8, concs available. www.royalacademy.org.uk
