Art Gallery

Cranach, Lucas the Elder (1472-1553), Lucas Sunder or Müller, who named himself after his Upper Franconian home town Kronach, probably spent his first years of training in his father's workshop. Nothing is known about his further training and his years of travelling. He was a German Renaissance painter and graphic artist, who excelled in portraits and female nudes.These works include The Judgment of Paris (1529, Metropolitan Museum, New York City) and Venus and Amor (1531, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium). Cranach was born in Kronach, Franconia, and lived in Vienna from about 1501 to 1504, making drawings for woodcuts and also painting. In 1504 he moved to Thuringia, following an invitation to become court painter to Frederic the Wise, and in 1505 settled permanently at Wittenberg. He painted biblical and mythological scenes with decorative sensual nudes. He had evidently studied Dürer's graphic art intensively. In his paintings, however, he showed at this time an imagination tending towards " romanticism", combined with an emotionalism heightened by colour - characteristics which formed the basis of his genius ("Crucifixion", Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, c.1500; "Crucifixion", Munich, Alte Pinakothek, 1503; "Resting on the Flight to Egypt".

In the works of this period, today regarded as the "true" Cranach, landscape and theme are brought to an atmospheric unity which must have impressed the young Altdorfer deeply. Cranach can be regarded as one of the founders of the Danube School. In Wittenberg began his first creative phase in which he produced his most important work belonging to the Dürer era. This gave place to a completely new style for which the courtly climate must at least in part have been responsible. A visit to the Netherlands in 1508 brought him into contact with Dutch art and indirectly with the conventions of the Italian Renaissance. Cranch's love of fine detail increased at the same rate as his intellectual perception of construction ("Torgau Altar", Frankfurt am Main, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, 1509), proportionally losing the rapt spontaneity of his early work. There is a faint echo of it in some works, such as his picture of "Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg before the Crucified One"

Cranach soon gained great esteem in Wittenberg. As a friend of Luther, he becamethe great portraitist during the Reformation without, however, committing himself to any particular confession. In the second quarter of the 16th century, while is workshop was flourishing, Cranach increasingly favoured a style tending towards the over-refined and Mannerist. This is especially noticeable in his depiction of the female nude, such as the panels of the Fall of Man and Venus and Lucretia. This too, may have been partly induced by courtly life with its predilection erotic representation.