When fine art jostles fashion art off the stage
The Cranach show at the Royal Academy is splendid and great fun. Lucas Cranach was perhaps the fastest painter who ever lived, working with astonishing speed and dexterity, obviously enjoying his job and rejoicing in his skill. He ran the biggest studio in Germany and was surrounded by goggling, admiring assistants, who learned to paint in his various manners, though the Master never let a work leave his studio unless it bore his personal touch. He flogged his art with tremendous gusto and no doubt became the richest painter of his day, at any rate north of the Alps. He was a big noise in Wittenberg, the centre of the Reformation, and the tax return of 1528 shows he was one of its two really wealthy citizens. He married two of his children into the family of the Electorate Chancellor.
I have little doubt he kept a string of mistresses, for what shines through his work is his passionate love of women, following the usual parabola of the courreur des dames, beginning with Junoesque types, then graduating to slender beauties with narrow loins and small breasts. His sexy nudes were hugely appealing to the lusty German rich. No less than 17 versions (they are not copies) survive of his ‘Nymph of the Spring’ and 22 of his lubricious ‘Venus with Cupid, the Honey Thief’. He obviously loved children, too, delighted in painting them, and did so with wonderful success. The best thing in the show is his portrait of the six-year-old son of his patron, Duke John the Steadfast, who as a grown-up duke in his own right, known as John Frederick the Magnanimous, was closely associated with the painter. The little boy, with his ostrich feather hat and his green and red stripy doublet, almost like a Highland plaid, is an arresting and touching figure, one of the finest child portraits we have. How I would love to possess it!
With his open adoration of women and children, Cranach has not been a favourite with homosexuals, and the art world being what it is, this has rather kept him down. It is a marvel how cheaply some of his works exchanged hands until comparatively recently. He is not on the same level as Dürer and Holbein, true enough, but he could do certain things better than either, not least introduce a note of chuckling intimacy.
This comes out beautifully in his ‘Christ with the Children’, an unusual topic with painters because it is so difficult. Cranach brings it off brilliantly, in several different versions. In the one in the RA show, the expression on Christ’s face is that of a posh Tory candidate forced by his agent to kiss plebeian babes during a general election. Even more notable, and funny, is the subtle class distinctions Cranach suggests among his mothers, scrambling anxiously and none too gently to get their infants into Christ’s embrace. The pushy, upper-class lady in the smart Jacques Fath-type dress has pulled rank and actually got her baby into Christ’s hands, while she prays piously. The expression on her face is the epitome of an upwardly mobile young Wittenbergoise during a moment of triumph. Other young mothers pull at Christ’s robes, push and shove each other and try to grab the Master, like teenagers at a pop concert. The ingenuity of the composition is breathtaking, and each mother, each child, is an individual, lovable creature. The work is a masterpiece by any standard, and I could gaze at it for hours.
I don’t think Cranach was at all a scrupulous man, except in fidelity to his art. In some ways, he was the supreme artist of the original Lutheran Reformation, and laid down the iconography of Luther himself and his family. These pictures are vastly interesting, though not particularly funny, and bring out the solid, stolid, obstinate, broad-shouldered immovability of these ultra-Germanic Saxonians, who got away with defying pope and emperor. They make a startling contrast with the spindly, hollow-cheeked, neurotic Melanchthon, the most painfully attractive of the anti-Roman intelligentsia. Cranach’s output and illustrations to early Protestant propaganda rendered enormous service to the cause.
Yet I don’t think Cranach had strong religious beliefs. He continued to work for Catholic patrons, and in particular, did some monstrous tongue-in-cheek pictures for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, a dedicated enemy of Luther, who would gladly have had the heresiarch burned alive. He shows His Eminence not only with a crucifix but as ‘Saint Jerome in his Study’, lion and all. These works are rich in symbols, open and secret, and made me laugh, as no doubt Cranach intended. But then anything involving Jerome is risible, as he was the most bad-tempered saint ever inserted, kicking and growling, into the canon. More seriously, however, Cranach was not going to sever his links with Catholic tradition, as that meant losing some of his best subject matter. So he continued to give Catholic patrons what they liked. He painted some of the most delicious and attractive madonnas of all time, using his skills and experience to combine innocence and virginity with a smart, highsociety chic, jewellery and clothes, so the viewer is quite bewildered about what to think. No problem for me: I have no objections to Mary being presented as a sex goddess. Cranach also painted a gorgeous Mary Magdalen, arranged in all her finery, though he also did her as a pensive, warm-hearted, sisterly type, next to her beloved Jesus, a two-headed masterpiece of holy charm. That, too, I should love to hang alongside my bed.
Cranach wanted it both ways, all the time. His attitude to sex was systematically ambivalent as well as a big joke. He captioned his ‘Nymph of the Spring’ piously: ‘Here I rest, do not disturb my sleep.’ Yet this ravishing creature has her eyes half-open, and is clearly inviting molestation. He puts sex-warnings on his ‘Venus with Cupids’, but the postures and symbols tell the viewer to ignore them. Especially when Venus is wearing nothing except a fantastic Ascot hat and a delicate gold necklace, the tone is refined pornography. It is an early indication of the German talent for screwing up nudity into the fantasy-perversion realm which was to find its full expression in Twenties Berlin.
Cranach used the ‘Age of Gold’ theme to paint his summation of nudity, but his preferences remain clear. Whereas his three men in a ring-a-roses centrepiece of the picture are brutes, one of whom is shouting furiously, the girls are exquisite and ladylike and, when clothed, fit to grace the presence chamber of the Emperor Charles V. Oddly enough, the RA is concurrently showing pictures from Russia, which include Matisse’s notorious exercise in a ring-a-roses theme, orange nudes dancing around pointlessly. I heard this daub recently acclaimed by one of our booby experts as the greatest painting of modern times. Its weak drawing and clumsy brushwork make it the epitome of fashion art. By contrast, Cranach’s delightful and sensitive ‘Age of Gold’, with its wonderful composition, colour, humour and impudent wickedness, is fine art at its most triumphant. It is good to see the art establishment, albeit unintentionally, bringing them (almost) together, to point the moral.
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