Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Crowded out

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 2nd April 2008

Cranach
Royal Academy, until 8 June

Cranach was responsible for at least a dozen versions of this picture over a 30-year period. The exhibition publicity stresses Cranach the businessman, and it’s certainly true that he was an immensely successful artist (much more so than his contemporary and rival Dürer, though Dürer was the far greater genius), who operated a workshop which turned out paintings on an industrial scale. As such they could not be especially personal works, so a courtly style was evolved which seemed to suit contemporary taste. It combined Gothic overall pattern-making with the new naturalistic descriptiveness of the Renaissance. The example of Dürer’s landscape backgrounds was carefully incorporated into early portraits as well as mythological and religious scenes, though as demand increased such details diminished. The courtly style was a generalised one: full-length, often life-size figures against a dark ground, the bodies frequently elongated and bulked out with elaborately patterned costumes.

Mythological subjects provided any number of excuses for depicting naked figures, and Cranach became something of a master at palely glimmering erotic nudes, painted very much to the taste of the day rather than classically idealised. But it is the early work that is most exceptional, before popularity instigated its inevitable dilution process. Cranach appeared almost out of nowhere around 1501 in Vienna. (There is nothing by him known before this, although he was already 30.) In 1505 he settled in Wittenberg, where he was to become court painter under three successive rulers of Saxony, and a prominent citizen. He designed crests, court dress and murals for Saxon palaces and hunting lodges. In addition to his painting production line, he owned a book-printing business, a pharmacy and a wineshop.

The crossing gallery contains the fabulous painting ‘Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg as St Jerome in His Study’ (1526), a bizarre picture which mismatches Renaissance clarity with medieval storytelling. On the other side of the screen on which it’s hung is the far more beguiling ‘Adam and Eve’ from the Courtauld. Half of this gallery is devoted to portraits, including the well-known one of Luther from Bristol, and a trio of heads — a watercolour of a peasant, with studies of a clean-shaven and a bearded man — which will please students of human nature. The last room is divided between a very fine row of nudes down the left wall, and more complex figure compositions down the right, with a portrait of Cranach himself (by his son, Lucas the Younger) glowering between.

Although lavishly illustrated, the catalogue is vast and unwieldy (£24.95 in paperback) and will no doubt languish unread on coffee tables throughout the land. A publication about a third of the size would be much more user-friendly and a really welcome addition to any art lover’s library.