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Thursday 4 December 2008

Crowded out

Cranach
Royal Academy, until 8 June

For years I’ve been trying to discourage young hopefuls from pursuing a career in art, in the belief that, if I can dissuade them, then they don’t have the conviction and inner necessity to be an artist. It takes toughness, determination and dedication to succeed in art, and it seems as if these are the qualities now required to visit exhibitions. So, don’t bother to go to the Cranach — much better to save your money for a cruise up the Rhine.

If you’re still reading this review, let us now turn to the exhibition itself. The show opens with religious pictures. As you enter the Sackler Galleries you see across the first room into the main gallery space where the busy and colourful ‘Triptych With the Holy Kinship’ (1509) commands the eye. A complex composition dominated by reds and blues, the religious story is here mixed with naturalism, as some of the men are recognisable portraits of contemporary political figures. Back in the first room, to your right, is an all-too-convincing ‘Crucifixion’ from c.1500, perhaps Cranach’s earliest surviving painting, a tough expressive picture notable for its incisive observation and drawing. (Lines are overlaid and overdrawn with an almost decorative intricacy.) To the left of this remarkable painting is a drawing of the Good Thief, in black-and-white chalk on pinkish paper, full of movement despite the overriding ugliness of the sagged and broken body.

This Crucifixion is more intense than the other Christian subjects in the first room. Look, for instance, at ‘The Martyrdom of St Catherine’ in which the drama of lightning flashes and dense cloud competes with the stylisation of the figures and the bulging codpieces of the men. In this room are also the first woodcuts of the show (Cranach is credited with the invention of the chiaroscuro woodcut), with a particularly fine stag hunt offering secular relief from religious suffering.

In the main gallery, an atmosphere of clutter begins to bear down on the viewer: there are too many pictures, not all of them of equal interest. There’s a very odd little ‘Nativity’ (c.1515–20), an adventurous night scene in which the Infant Jesus is mobbed by cherubs, with an Annunciation to the Shepherds going on in the top-left corner. I rather liked the feathery intricacy of the northern-looking vegetation in ‘St Jerome Writing in a Landscape’, though the half-naked saint looks in danger of catching his death. There are a couple of bloodthirsty beheadings, while Salome is shown (with John the Baptist’s head) looking like an only-slightly-more-depraved-than-normal northern girl in furs, like something out of a Holbein portrait. There are good portraits of the Apostles Peter and Paul, Peter in particular looking as if painted from life, and a marvellous ‘Judgment of Paris’ from Fort Worth, notable for the gormless expressions on the faces not only of the three barely distinguished goddesses (Hera, Athene and Venus) but also on the collapsed and over-armoured Paris.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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