Lucas Cranach the Elder: His Art and His Market

 

Cranach’s innate talent soon attracted the attention of Frederick III, called The Wise, Elector of Saxony, who appointed him court painter and summoned him to Wittenberg. Cranach arrived in the spring of 1505, and remained there in the university town of Wittenberg on the Elbe for the following 45 years. In 1508, Cranach was ennobled and awarded his coat of arms, bearing the winged serpent that became his signature. Over the course of his time at court, Cranach served three Electors: Frederick III (ruled 1486– 1525); Johann the Steadfast (ruled 1525 – 1532) and Johann Frederick I, the Magnanimous (ruled 1532 – 1547). In 1537, Cranach was elected burgomaster of Wittenburg.

 

That city was most famous for the event that sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517: the publication of the Ninety-five Theses, a critique of the granting of indulgences by the Catholic Church, drafted by the theologian and priest Martin Luther (1483 – 1546). Luther, who began teaching at the University of Wittenberg in 1508, had become friendly with Cranach, who painted his portrait, as well as those of his wife and parents. After Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1520 for refusing to renounce his own writings, Cranach continued to support and paint him, creating works that served as valuable propaganda for the Protestant reformers.

 

With his unique and immediately recognisable style, his unsurpassed network of historically significant patrons and portrait subjects, and his creative talents across media, Cranach achieved success and fame during his lifetime as well as posthumously through the efforts of his son, Lucas the Younger, and a substantial family workshop. By 1528, he was the richest landowner in Wittenberg. Thanks to the numerous versions of his religious and secular compositions that exist, Cranach is well-known on the art market, but paintings securely attributed to Cranach the Elder are increasingly rare and highly prized. But this was not always the case; as tastes evolved, the market for works by Cranach saw a dip in the 17th and 18th Centuries, when his style was viewed as outmoded, before enjoying a resurgence beginning in the 19th Century.

 

Ironically, it was the characteristics that made Cranach’s work so immediately recognisable and desirable in his own time and in the modern era – the Gothic stylisation, the brilliant, flat areas of colour and the decorative and rhythmic pattern – that led him to fall out of favour for centuries. The 17th Century was dominated by the dramatic and dynamic aesthetic of the Baroque, with its swirling, painterly passages, heightened emotion and theatrical contrasts between light and shadow. In contrast, Cranach’s Northern Renaissance style was characterised by precise details, rhythmic linearity and highly stylised figures with Mannerist proportions, which collectors viewed as outdated and naïve. Those of his German contemporaries who were sought-after included Albrecht Dürer and some of the later Flemish masters, including the Brueghels, but Cranach began to fade into obscurity.

 

This trend continued into the 18th Century, when Enlightenment ideals favoured the classical proportions of Renaissance masters such as Raphael, while still retaining some Baroque drama. Once again, artists of the Northern Renaissance such as Cranach were dismissed as ‘Gothic’, awkward and non-naturalistic. Theorists and art critics such as Johann Winckelmann celebrated ancient Greek sculpture as an ideal of beauty and proportion, setting it up in contrast to the elongated or exaggerated figures painted by Cranach and other early Northern masters.

 

In was only at the very end of the 18th and in the early 19th Century that Cranach began to reclaim some of his earlier popularity, particularly in Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire. The writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived in Weimar, where Cranach is buried, was an enthusiastic collector of works on paper, and owned several drawings by Cranach. He praised Cranach’s skilful and detailed manner, declaring that ‘in respect of truth and vigour’ Cranach stood as a rival to Titian. Cranach was adopted as a hero of the German Romantic and Nazarene movements, which rejected Neoclassicism and Enlightenment reasoning, and sought instead to reclaim the spiritual purity of earlier Medieval and Gothic art, much as the Pre-Raphaelites did in England. And he was raised up as a German national hero later in the 19th Century for his role as chronicler of the Protestant Reformation and identity as a close friend of Martin Luther. His work thus appealed on both aesthetic and emotional grounds.

 

Cranach’s reputation rose still further in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Although in the late 19th Century some Cranach had entered English collections – such as the panels now in the National Gallery, purchased in 1875 by the banker Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone – it was not until the early 20th Century that the National Gallery began acquiring Cranachs for the Nation. By the middle of last century, collectors and dealers were pursuing his work privately and at auction. The distinctiveness and recognisability of his manner was once again a virtue, and the high number of surviving works – over 1000 by Cranach or his studio – added to his influence.

 

Cranach was cited as a source of inspiration by Picasso, particularly in his print work. His 1949 series David and Bathsheba, after Lucas Cranach is a series of a dozen lithographs based on Cranach’s 1526 painting now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. Picasso first encountered the work in 1937 in a black-and-white exhibition catalogueand went on to produce a total of 13 states and versions. He also created a series of colour linocuts based on Lucas the Younger’s Portrait of a Young Girl, which featured on a postcard sent to him by his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Cranach continues to influence 21st Century artists such as John Currin, who borrows the artist’s elongated, stylised female figures, and in 2017 The National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan staged Lucas Cranach the Elder: 500 Years of the power of temptation to explore Cranach’s influence on later artists. This show included examples by Picasso and Currin as well as Man Ray, Duchamp and the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura.

 

Works by Cranach the Elder are rare on the market and continue to fetch ever-higher prices. 17 of the top 20 prices achieved at auction were fetched in the 21st Century. Cranach’s portraits and mythological works are often his most desirable, and only three of the top 20 prices at auction were achieved by religious artworks (one of these a triptych). And thanks to the existence of the Cranach Digital Archive, provenance and attribution research are made easier, with digital records and historical references accessible in a single location.