Cranach, Lucas the Elder
Cranach, Lucas the Elder ( 1472-1553 ) . German painter. He takes his name from the little town of Kronach in South Germany, where he was born, and really small is known of his life before about 1500-01, when he settled in Vienna and started working in the humanist circles associated with the freshly founded university. His stay in Vienna was brief ( he left in 1504 ) , but in his period there he painted some of his finest and most original plants. They include portrayals, notably those of Johannes Cuspinian, a lector at the university, and his married woman Anna ( Reinhart Collection, Winterhur ) , and several spiritual plants in which he shows a singular feeling for the beauty of landscape feature of the Danube school. The finest illustration of this mode is possibly the Rest on the Flight into Egypt ( Staatliche Museen, Berlin ) , which shows the Holy Family resting in the clearing of a German pine forest. It was painted in 1504, merely before Cranach went to Wittenberg as tribunal painter to Frederick III ( the Wise ) , Elector of Saxony.
Cranach remained in Wittenberg until 1550, when he followed John Frederick ( the Unfortunate ) , the last Saxon Elector of the Ernestine subdivision, into expatriate, in Augsburg. During his clip in Wittenberg he became highly affluent and one of the metropolis ‘s most well-thought-of citizens, functioning as burgomaster for several
old ages. His pictures were thirstily sought by aggregators, and his busy studio frequently produced legion reproduction of popular designs, peculiarly those in which he showed his accomplishment at picturing female beauty — more than 10 versions are known of his Lean backing Nymph. He excelled at titillating nudes, which sometimes draw on Italian Renaissance theoretical accounts but are wholly different in spirit, and he besides had a preference for images of flirtatious adult females have oning big chapeaus, sometimes shown as Judith or the goddesses in the Judgement of Paris. The most advanced plants of his Wittenberg period, nevertheless, are likely his full-length portrayals ( The Duke and Duchess of Saxony, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1514 ) .
Cranach continued with his spiritual work, but his wood engraving designs ( notably those for the first German edition of the New Testament in 1522 ) are by and large more interesting that his pictures in this domain. He besides painted several portrayals of Martin Luther. Despite his commitment to the Protestant cause, he continued to work for Catholic frequenters and was a really sharp man of affairs. During the last old ages of his life Cranach was assisted by his boy, Lucas the Younger ( 1515-86 ) , who carried on the tradition of the workshop and imitated his male parent ‘s manner so successfully that it is frequently hard to separate between their custodies.
