Lucas Cranach: A Master of Irony and Ambiguity
By Souren Melikian
LONDON: Five hundred years ago, Europe lost its innocence and discovered ambiguity. From north to south, its painters gave their female sitters expressions of laughing irony. In Germany, Lucas Cranach the Elder was the first to break with the past by portraying lovely princesses and saints with the same indescribable glint of amusement.
Smiling skepticism may have come naturally to Leonardo, a man of science, but Cranach's laughter that comes across some of his most admirable pictures in the retrospective on view at the Royal Academy until June 8 is more intriguing.
What little is known about his early years sheds no light on the matter. Bodo Brinkmann, the curator from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt who masterminded the show, found little to say apart from the fact that the artist, born Hans Maler in Kronach around 1472 was apparently the son of a painter, as indicated by the noun following the name Hans. No work by the artist can be dated prior to the early 1500s, by which time he was living in Vienna. In 1505, he moved to Wittenberg and became court artist to the Saxon Electors under three successive rulers. This would appear to suggest a smooth character nimbly working his way through the difficult times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, an assumption borne out by his oeuvre.
Cranach was personally involved in the Reformation movement. A close friend of Martin Luther, he illustrated a number of the Protestant preacher's anti-Catholic tracts. On the other hand, some of his earliest masterpieces dealt with purely Catholic subjects. In his "Triptych with the Holy Kinship," signed and dated 1509, the painter illustrates the theme of the legendary family of Jesus, depicting Anne (mother of Mary), supposed to have been successively married to Joachim, Cleophas and Salomas, and the Virgin's two stepsisters (both called Mary), and their offspring.
In so doing, the nimble-minded courtier that Cranach was manipulated legendary history to make political points guaranteed to earn him the favors of the most powerful man in his part of the world - Emperor Maximilian to whom regional German rulers owed allegiance. As noted by Brinkmann, the Elector Frederick the Wise and his brother Duke John the Steadfast lend their features to the husbands of Mary's stepsisters, a fact established by Cranach's own portraits of these worthy gentlemen.
Better still, the second and third husbands of St. Anne who appear behind the parapet of the gallery have the appearance of Emperor Maximilian and one of his councilors.
The underlying idea is that the Saxon leaders are loyal to the emperor - as Brinkmann noticed, the frieze bearing regional coats of arms on the gallery parapet marks it out as Saxon territory.
A smile of unctuous satisfaction plays on the lips of the two mothers portrayed as the wives of Frederick the Wise and John the Steadfast. On the back of each of these side wings, Mary and St. Anne are painted in grisaille. Mary's faint smile, seemingly expressive of tolerant resignation, contrasts with the older Anne's sneer in bitter awareness at the ways of the world. If an operator, Cranach was not a complacent one.
Nor did the artist court convention. In an astonishing picture in oil and tempera on vellum laid down on panel, Jesus appears head and shoulders side by side with a wistful-looking woman. She tilts her head toward him, almost as if she were about to lean on his shoulder. Her identity is hardly evident. Is this Mary, the mother of Jesus? Or Mary Magdalen the repenting sinner? The latter, Brinkmann surmises. In that case, the boldness of this icon remains unmatched in Cranach's time.
A more discreet if equally surprising liberty was taken by Cranach with the traditional rendition of the "Virgin and Child" in a picture preserved in Karlsruhe, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle. Mary, depicted as a beautiful young woman, purses her lips as she bends her head toward the infant Jesus with an enigmatic smile. Babyish wonderment can be read into the infant's face as he clumsily raises his hand, hoping to touch his mother's cheek.
The nuances of Mary's expression range from tenderness mixed with self-confidence to irony (at mankind's anticipated ferocity?), tempered by a sense of relativity. Here Cranach seems to deliver his personal message about humans and their unfathomable ways.
The slick courtier that Cranach was could also be an uncompromising reader of his sitters' minds as is shown by some of his merciless likenesses. In 1527, he portrayed Martin Luther's parents Hans and Margaretha. Hans, the son of a farmer who later ran a copper factory with varying success, looks like an old rogue. Margaretha, who bore him nine children including Martin, has the sunken cheeks of a tough old nut, inured against the hardships of life. At the same time, there is a curious tired satisfaction about the old lady. Her son Martin had married the year before and he was now famous.
To have thus represented the father and mother of a man to whom he was so close speaks for Cranach's independence of mind when the need arose. The two portraits are personal mementos, intended for the elderly couple if not Martin Luther himself. Yet no attempt is made to flatter.
Better still, two years later Cranach did not repress the laughing little devil in him when painting the portraits of Martin Luther and his wife, Katharina von Bora. Martin, the ex-Augustinian monk who had broken his vows, married Katherina, a former nun, in 1525. The artist, who was a witness at the wedding, executed portraits in the form of two medallions, which were replicated for propaganda purposes - the idea was to drive home the point that celibacy of the clergy was henceforth rejected.
A second series in diptych form launched in 1528 provided a polished-up version. However, a specimen in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt hardly offers an idealized image of Martin Luther. The squint is noticeable and the smile on the thin lips of his brutish face is not exactly endearing. Was the painter fundamentally incapable of disguising what he thought he read into his sitters' features?
A study in pen, black chalk and oil for the portrait of a young man from a patrician background immortalizes the weakish stubbornness of the character, as if he were concealing some outrageous lie or cowardly piece of treachery. No matching picture is known. Perhaps the sitter decided he was better off without one.
Cranach was kinder to an elderly countryman whose likeness on paper is done as a close-up view, as if to concentrate on the lucid blue eyes gazing into the distance, and the lips ever so slightly open to utter some jocular remark about fate. This is a timeless psychological probe into the mind of an aging man looking back on life.
Perhaps the German master's sharp perception of people as they are explains his flights into irony, in some kind of search for relief. But it strangely contrasts with a female type that recurs again and again like some obsession.
The woman has slanting eyes, high cheekbones and a smile on her closed lips. She can be artificially prim like the repentant sinner Mary Magdalen, or exaggeratedly sweet like St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who legitimized Christian worship in the western Roman Empire in 313, or a figure of dreamy seduction as is the case with "a generalized Portrait of a Woman," to use Brinkmann's curious expression. Sometimes, she even appears as a delicate beauty, lost in contemplation, as in "The Princess and the Legend of St. John Chrysostom." Throughout, she wears the same crimson velvet dress with a deep décolleté and a flounced skirt
Going from one variant to the next is like following receding apparitions in a dream. Was this an image based in reality, sending back reflections of love and betrayal in the painter's early life? Or is it just a type with some undeciphered meaning? The unresolved enigma nicely fits the Master of the Ambiguous Smile, as Cranach would no doubt be called by art historians if we did not know his name.
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