Lucas Cranach

Sigmund Kingsfel c1530

Compton Verney collection

Oil on panel

Lucas Cranach

Cupid complaining to Venus c1526-7

National Gallery collection

Oil on wood, transferred to Masonite

Accessed online due to the Covid-19 restrictions,  the exhibition is presented through a virtual tour of the exhibition by the curator Amy Orrnock, images of some of the works and the exhibition text. 

 

The exhibition is of Cranach’s relatively small oil paintings and woodcut prints together with the work of contemporary artists who have been inspired by the work of Lucas Cranach. Cranach was a sixteenth century painter and printmaker, but also an entrepreneur and politician. He was very successful in his lifetime and prolific so quite a substantial body of his work survives today. He was painter to the Elector of Saxony, a friend and supporter of Martin Luther and ran a successful print workshop that produced woodcuts in support of Luther’s ideas whilst at the same time painting portraits of prominent Catholics in Wittenberg. 

 

His paintings are in oils on wooden panels. As well as expressive portraits he is best known for his sensual nudes, with their elongated bodies and pale luminous flesh. In the exhibition there are two specific examples Cupid complaining to Venus c1526-7 from the National Gallery and Venus and Cupid c1525 from Compton Verney’s own collection. Ostensibly painted to convey a moral message that warned of the danger of women, these are intimate and erotic nudes, something that is exaggerated by their small scale. The hat in the National Gallery painting and the flimsy gauze in Venus and Cupid only serve to emphasise the women’s nakedness. 

 

Prompted to access this exhibition not by John Currin’s reinterpretation of Cranach’s work but by Berlinde de Bruyckere link who acknowledges the profound influence of Flemish and German Renaissance artists’ work on her own. 

Talking about Cranach she says: 

‘When I look at his paintings, I experience their physicality as the medium to express the thoughts and concerns of those figures: their fears, their passions, their doubts…Above all I feel an affinity with the way he deals with corporeality, the way he uses the sensual body as an image for the mental body’.

 

This is treatment of the corporeality of his figures is not just present in Cranach’s nudes but his portraits too. The Portrait of  Sigmund Kingsfelt, c1530, is a particularly vibrant and lifelike example, the sitter appears surprisingly modern because of the very empathetic and apparently, truthful representation of the sitter’s thoughtful and accepting expression. The skin is sensitively handled, hauntingly real, with an ethereal internal luminosity. 

 

Though her work is not included in this exhibition the direct relationship between the work of de Bruyckere and Cranach are clear ‘in her powerful and disturbing renderings of wax limbs and torsos, which were feature in dialogue with Cranach paintings … The Mystery of the Body at the Kunstmuseum Bern’ (1) in 2012. 

 

Accessing the work of Renaissance painters through the work of contemporary artists who have found inspiration in their work, brings a new dimension to Cranach and offers a different perspective his work. The exhibition also features the work of Michael Landy and  Ishbel Myerscough.

 

1 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/from-the-archive-why-the-art-world-is-crazy-about-cranach