Painter, born in Kronach, EC Germany, from where he took his name. In 1504 he became court painter at Wittenberg to the Elector Frederick. His paintings include sacred and a few classical subjects, hunting scenes, and portraits. He was closely associated with the German Reformers, many of whom (including Luther and Melanchthon) were portrayed by himself and his pupils. A Crucifixion in the Stadkirche, Weimar, is his masterpiece. Of three sons, all painters, the second, Lucas Cranach the Younger (151586), painted so like his father that their works are difficult to distinguish.
Lucas Cranach the Elder (Lucas Cranach der Ältere, 1472 – October 16, 1553) was a German painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving.
Early life
He was born at Kronach in upper Franconia, and learned the art of drawing from his father.
According to Gunderam, the tutor of Cranach's children, Cranach signalized his talents as a painter before the close of the 15th century. The records of Wittenberg confirm Gunderam's statement to this extent that Cranach's name appears for the first time in the public accounts on the 24th of June 1504, when he drew 50 gulden for the salary of half a year, as pictor ducalis.
The only clue to Cranach's settlement previous to his Wittenberg appointment is afforded by the knowledge that he owned a house at Gotha, and that Barbara Brengbier, his wife, was the daughter of a burgher of that city.
Career
The first evidence of his skill as an artist comes in a picture dated 1504. his pictures of deer and wild boar were considered striking, and the duke fostered his passion for this form of art by taking him out to the hunting field, where he sketched "his grace" running the stag, or Duke John sticking a boar.
Before 1508 he had painted several altar-pieces for the Castle Church at Wittenberg in competition with Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair and others; the duke and his brother John were portrayed in various attitudes and a number of the best woodcuts and copper-plates were published.
Great honour accrued to Cranach when he went in 1509 to the Netherlands, and took sittings from the Emperor Maximilian and the boy who afterwards became Charles V. Until 1508 Cranach signed his works with the initials of his name. In that year the elector gave him the winged snake as a motto, and this motto, or Kleinod, as it was called, superseded the initials on all his pictures after that date.
Somewhat later the duke conferred on him the monopoly of the sale of medicines at Wittenberg, and a printer's patent with exclusive privileges as to copyright in Bibles. The presses of Cranach were used by Martin Luther.
Relations of friendship united the painter with the Protestant Reformers at a very early period; The oldest notice of Cranach in the Reformer's correspondence dates from 1520. His first engraved portrait by Cranach represents an Augustinian friar, and is dated 1520. Five years later the friar dropped the cowl, and Cranach was present as "one of the council" at the betrothal festival of Luther and Katharina von Bora.
The death at short intervals of the electors Frederick and John (1525 and 1532) brought no change in the prosperous situation of the painter; John Frederick was taken prisoner at the Battle of Mühlberg, and Wittenberg was subjected to the stress of siege. As Cranach wrote from his house at the corner of the marketplace to the grand-master Albert of Brandenburg at Königsberg to tell him of John Frederick's capture, he showed his attachment by saying, "I cannot conceal from your Grace that we have been robbed of our dear prince, who from his youth upwards has been a true prince to us, but God will help him out of prison, for the Kaiser is bold enough to revive the Papacy, which God will certainly not allow." During the siege Charles bethought him of Cranach, whom he remembered from his childhood and summoned him to his camp at Pistritz. Cranach came, reminded his majesty of his early sittings as a boy, and begged on his knees for kind treatment to the elector.
Three years afterwards, when all the dignitaries of the Empire met at Augsburg to receive commands from the emperor, and Titian came at Charles's bidding to paint Philip of Spain, John Frederick asked Cranach to visit the Swabian capital;
He died on the 16th of October 1553 at Weimar, where the house in which he lived still stands in the marketplace.
Cranach's Art
The oldest extant picture of Cranach, the "Rest of the Virgin during the Flight into Egypt," marked with the initials L.C., and the date of 1504, is by far the most graceful creation of his pencil.
Cranach's art in its prime was doubtless influenced by causes which but slightly affected the art of the Italians, but weighed with potent consequence on that of the Netherlands and Germany. We have thus to account for the comparative unproductiveness as painters of Dürer and Holbein, and at the same time to explain the shallowness apparent in many of the later works of Cranach; but we attribute to the same cause also the tendency in Cranach to neglect effective colour and light and shade for strong contrasts of flat tint.
Constant attention to mere contour and to black and white appears to have affected his sight, and caused those curious transitions of pallid light into inky grey which often characterize his studies of flesh; There are, no doubt, some few pictures by Cranach in which the flesh-tints display brightness and enamelled surface, but they are quite exceptional.
As a composer Cranach was not greatly gifted.
It is curious to watch the changes which mark the development of his instincts as an artist during the struggles of the Reformation.
One of the latest pictures with which the name of Cranach is connected is the altarpiece which Cranach's son completed in 1555, and which is now (1911) in the Stadtkirche (city church) at Weimar. John the Baptist points to the suffering Christ, whilst the blood-stream falls on the head of Cranach, and Luther reads from his book the words, "The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin." Cranach sometimes composed gospel subjects with feeling and dignity.
But he was not exclusively a religious painter. In 1546, possibly under Italian influence, Cranach composed the "Fons Juventutis" ("Fountain of Youth") of the Berlin Gallery, executed by his son, a picture in which hags are seen entering a Renaissance fountain, and are received as they issue from it with all the charms of youth by knights and pages.
Cranach's chief occupation was that of portrait painting, and we are indebted to him chiefly for the preservation of the features of all the German Reformers and their princely adherents. It is characteristic of Cranach's readiness, and a proof that he possessed ample material for mechanical reproduction, that he received payment at Wittenberg in 1533. Amongst existing likenesses we should notice as the best that of Albert, elector of Mainz, in the Berlin museum, and that of John, elector of Saxony, at Dresden.
Cranach had three sons, all artists: John Lucas Cranach, who died at Bologna in 1536; Hans Cranach, whose life is obscure;
User Comments Add a comment…