Artist Dossier: Lucas Cranach the Elder

Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Lucas Cranach the Elder may not have been as skilled as such contemporaries as Albrecht Durer or Matthias Grunewald, but his works, including this "Portrait of a Princess of Saxony," circa 1512, have a particular appeal.

From the Files

+ The artist's auction record stands at £4.8 million ($8.6 million)—also the highest auction price for any German painting— set at Christie's London in 1990 by a rare 1509 portrait diptych depicting Johann the Steadfast and his six-year-old son, Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous.

+ The prosperous painter-printer ran an apothecary shop that had a monopoly on the sale of medicines, dabbled in real estate and maintained exclusive rights to Bible production in Wittenberg.

+ In 1509, Friedrich the Wise conferred on Cranach a coat of arms featuring a snake with bat wings and a jeweled ring in its jaw; from then on the artist used the snake as a signature in all his works.

+ After the Getty purchased the oil-on-paper study Man in a Red Cap at Sotheby's London in 1991 for £187,000 ($267,000), the museum restored the work and removed 17th-century additions of a hat and shirt.

Pablo Picasso Albrecht Durer John Currin Albrecht Altdorfer Hans Baldung Grien Hans Cranach Lucas Cranach the Elder Lucas Cranach the Younger

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Collectors in this field will find, however, that paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder are still surprisingly available. And while Cranach may not be as skilled as his contemporaries Durer or Grunewald, his works are more beguiling. Indeed, an exhibition last summer at the Courtauld Institute, in London, that focused on a notable Cranach in its collection, Adam and Eve in Paradise, 1526, was a surprise hit.

Specialists at Christie’s and Sotheby’s note that at least two or three Cranachs are offered every season in New York or London. In April 2006, for instance, the unusually detailed Saint Barbara in a Wooded Landscape, circa 1515–18, which had been off the market since the late 1920s, sold at Christie’s New York for a remarkable $4.9 million (est. $1.5–2.5 million). Examples also change hands in private sales: In 2004, the Kimbell, in Fort Worth, purchased the artist’s Judgment of Paris, circa 1512–14, which had fetched £1.2 million ($3.3 million) in 1996 at Sotheby’s London; and in 2003 the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, bought A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, a panel painting from circa 1526.

Woodcut prints are rare to the market, especially early ones, but when examples do come up, they are priced in the five figures (the auction record for such works is $40,000). “Most collectors of German prints are only interested in Durer,” says Armand Kunz of C. G. Boerner gallery in New York. “So Cranach prints remain a surprising bargain, despite their rarity.”  

Cranach’s beginnings are somewhat mysterious. His family name is believed to be Sunder, but he adopted a new surname from his hometown of Kronach, in lower Franconia, where he was born in 1472. There is no record of his activities for the first decades of his life, but by 1501, he was residing in Vienna. Just a handful of works survive from the few years he spent there, all of which are in museums. With their saturated colors, monumental figures and florid backgrounds, these dramatic compositions exhibit a desire to dazzle absent from his later output. They include several biblical subjects, notably a Crucifixion and Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, both in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Rest on the Flight into Egypt, in the Gemaldegalerie, Berlin.

In 1505, Cranach was appointed court painter to Friedrich the Wise, elector of Saxony, and he relocated to Wittenberg, which Friedrich was intent on developing into an intellectual center. The artist proved himself a devoted and industrious servant to the court, heading a large workshop of students and assistants (including his sons, Hans and Lucas the Younger, who would become a major talent in his own right) and producing altarpieces, portraits and engravings in addition to decorating furniture for hunting lodges and ducal residences. He became a close friend of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon and was instrumental in disseminating their reformist views via propagandistic paintings, prints and tracts. The Cranach workshop produced “celebrity” portraits of Luther by the dozens for an eager clientele; typical of these is Martin Luther and His Wife, Katherina von Bora, a small pair of panels that sold for £608,750 ($875,899) at Christie’s London in 2001. Despite his connections with the powers behind the Reformation, Cranach accepted devotional commissions from Luther’s archenemy, Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg.

As Cranach became more successful, his work grew more polished and standardized and thus easier for assistants to produce. Cranach scholars try “to differentiate the hands of Lucas the Elder, Lucas the Younger and various workshop assistants,” says Nicholas Hall, of Christie’s New York, but “many collectors are not as fastidious. They want a recognizable Cranach and are not overly concerned over how many hands produced it.”

Some connoisseurs, on the other hand, have been put off by the relative blandness of the later works, whether by Cranach himself or by his assistants, preferring the artist’s Vienna period. In 1932, the art historian Max Friedlander disappointedly likened the mature paintings to a “smooth, shiny chestnut burst from a prickly, green shell,” stating that “had Cranach died in 1505, he would have lived in our memory as an artist charged with dynamite. But he did not die until 1553, and instead of watching his powers explode, we see them fizzle out.” In portraits of this period, the artist abandons his earlier backgrounds of verdant landscapes in favor of solid colors, and the modeled faces and costumes become flat and linear. His mythological pictures, meanwhile, follow a set formula: a figure adjacent to a hedge or tree with a mountaintop castle in the background and blue skies above. Yet it is exactly this stylization that makes his works so strikingly contemporary.

“I know of one collector who buys very cutting-edge contemporary art, and the only Old Master who appeals to him is Cranach,” says Christopher Apostle, of Sotheby’s New York. “He likes his bold simplicity.”  

The record for a painting by Cranach is £4.8 million ($8.6 million)—also the highest auction price for any German painting—set at Christie’s London in 1990 by a rare portrait diptych of 1509 in its original frame from Schloss Wildenstein, in Switzerland. Depicting Johann the Steadfast (brother of Friedrich the Wise) and his six-year-old son, Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, the picture has been known to scholars since the early 1970s and was last seen publicly in the great Cranach exhibition at the Basel Museum in 1972; the National Gallery in London purchased it privately in 1991. The equally beautiful and surprisingly sensual Head of Christ with Crown of Thorns, circa 1509, close in style and quality to the works of Cranach’s Vienna period, was consigned to Sotheby’s London in 2004 as an anonymous 16th-century Italian painting. Its true authorship was recognized before the sale, and despite its sober subject and intimate size (8 by 10 inches) it sold for £677,600 ($1.3 million)—a great bargain in retrospect.

Skilled in both portraiture and religious subjects, Cranach is nevertheless best known for his mythological paintings and his distinctive and slightly fetishistic renderings of female nudes. Blonde and lithe, with small, pert breasts and long legs, the Cranach nude—be she Venus, Diana or Athena—poses coyly, usually adorned with gold, jewels and a feather-trimmed velvet hat. These delicately decadent figures have inspired many modern and contemporary painters, from Otto Dix and Pablo Picasso to John Currin.

Although Cranach’s prices have escalated over the past 10 years, works by the master still remain a better buy than those of his “disciples.” Most collectors want Cranach the sensualist, and when these subjects do appear, they garner high prices. In July 2005, his Venus and Cupid, circa 1525, sold for a remarkable £2.4 million ($4.1 million), despite some damage and repainting. Even Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief, a large panel of obvious workshop origin (from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker) sold at Christie’s last April for $824,000 (est. $200–300,000).

His paintings of male subjects remain reasonable, their price depending on the attractiveness of the sitter and the decorative effect of the costume. An excellent studio portrait of the adult Johann Friedrich brought £344,000 ($637,037; est. £300–500,000) at Christie’s London in July 2006. A picture entirely by Cranach’s hand of Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 1511–12, sold at Sotheby’s London in 2001, for just £278,500 ($400,719), due probably to the sitter’s unfortunately crossed eyes.

What’s next for the Cranach market? “There are quite a few important Cranachs still hidden away in German collections,” says George Gordon, of Sotheby’s London. Some of these may be coaxed out of hiding, thanks to a retrospective, including more than 100 of the artist’s works, on view through February 17, 2008, at the Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, and from March 12 through June 8 at London’s Royal Academy. Cranach enthusiasts would particularly welcome the recovery of a 1512 Madonna and Child that was looted from the Warsaw Cathedral after World War ii and has been missing since. Should that work ever resurface and come on the market, according to one New York Old Masters dealer, “it could fetch between $10 million and $15 million—just for starters.” Prices for works by Lucas the Younger are not far behind. His Portrait of a Lady in a Green Velvet and Orange Dress and a Pearl-Embroidered Black Hat, circa 1541, stunned the audience at Christie’s London this past July by selling to dealer Konrad Bernheimer for a record £1.8 million ($3.6 million). Like father, like son. 

"Artist Dossier: Lucas Cranach the Elder" comes to ARTINFO from the December 2007 issue of Art & Auction magazine.