Lucas Cranach the Younger

In the collection of family of the present owners for several generations.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: This painting is on a pine panel. There are probably three original joints, but various cracks, some of which continue down the full length of the panel, rather confuse the matter. In general the upper part has tended to be rather more affected, with a few shorter cracks running upwards in the lower sky although without reaching the top. The reverse of the panel is also confusing, as it seems to have been thinned and backed and cradled rather long ago. This backing has itself been affected by worm damage since then and at upper left a further crack has had a strip of canvas added apparently rather more recently behind the sliding cross bars of the cradle, possibly with an extra little added strip of wood below as well. The paint surface has just been restored, filling and retouching the various cracks and joints. The sky has had more wear and damage than anywhere else, with more widespread retouching visible under ultra violet light. There is also a band of retouching along the base edge and one quite broad old loss running up by and partially through the small child standing near the left base corner. However the fine detail almost throughout the great throng of figures elsewhere has been remarkably well preserved generally, (with a few faces inevitably having a joint or crack running through it, including that of the Madonna) but many figures are almost perfectly intact. An especially vivid and unworn example is the soldier in armour immediately below the cross, with a beautiful head of a horse next to him. The darker drapery has been strengthened in some places, mainly in the blacks, but the other brilliantly coloured materials and accoutrements remain largely complete and well preserved, as does the fine minutiae of the drawing in the faces almost throughout. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.
And ...Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

(Matthew 27:45-46)

Against a jigsaw of jagged-edged clouds, rising ever denser into a thunderous mass of gloom, hangs the crucified Christ, flanked on either side by a thief in three-quarter profile. Beneath them crowd an impossible arrangement of figures, lovers, loathers, and the merely curious. In their amorphous arrangement Cranach manifests a blatant disregard for visual perspective, indeed of any understanding of space whatsoever; his interest, instead, lies in the attainment of the greatest possible visual impact. Thus piled on top, and squashed up against, one another are a cacophony of moustachioed and bearded onlookers, families and soldiers clad in armour, their spears and axes breaking the horizon formed by the tops of the myriad of heads, hats and helmets. As an exercise in perspective it is a peculiarity that works neither from below nor above but which achieves the effect of an uproarious denouement of shock, anger, gloating and motherly anguish.

The formula, in fact, varies little from that of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Crucifixion of 1538 in the Art Institute, Chicago¹ (fig. 1) which itself is the culmination of over twenty years’ worth of compositional evolution, starting with the Dürer-esque 1503 Crucifixion in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich which shows the scene side on.²  Next is the now frontal but meagrely populated work of 1515-20 in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt,³ and the central panel to a triptych formerly with Goudstikker,⁴ both of which are still spatially legible. Then comes the now perspectively defunct panel of 1532 in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana⁵ and finally the culmination in the Chicago panel. The later of these works, and particularly those in Chicago and Indianapolis, are characterised more and more by the effervescent sky that so dramatically sets off the three crucified figures in the younger Cranach’s interpretation. This version is, too, of the same dimensions as the Chicago panel and of several other treatments by the younger Cranach, namely those in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden and the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau. Another version to which the present lot closely corresponds is in the Museo Lazaro Galdiano, Madrid, though that version is no longer unanimously considered an autograph work by the elder Cranach (fig. 2).

Each of the other versions, by both father and son, show the thieves’ crosses at the extreme left and right margins; here however Cranach has, in modern parlance, ‘zoomed out’ so as to push them to the centre, allowing him to include ever more foreground and even more figures. The figures are vastly more numerous here than in all other versions, and animated and characterised beyond those of all precursors. We see here the emergence of the artistic personality of Lucas Cranach the Younger who, by the time this was most likely painted, in the late 1540s or 1550s, was in sole charge of the Cranach workshop and enterprise in Wittenberg. Gone is the slavish imitator of the elder Cranach, replaced by an artist driven by his own volition. Though always founded in his father’s idiom, his mature work soon finds its own idiosyncrasies; Cranach steps out of the paternal shadow to form his own artistic language and style.  

Such a large and highly detailed panel would inevitably have been completed with a degree of workshop assistance and here some figures are clearly better conceived than others. Dr. Dieter Koepplin concurs with a dating to the artist’s maturity and likewise considers elements of the painting executed by an assistant. Conversely, Dr. Werner Schade dates the work much earlier, to before 1515, noting the archaic setting and the use of a number of strange mediaeval elements such as the ray-like aureoles emanating from Christ, the Virgin and St. John. Furthermore, he argues that the juxtaposition between the Penitent and Impenitent thieves, which becomes the standard iconography for the scene of the Crucifixion at a later date, is not yet applicable in this work. On the basis of photographs, Dr. Schade has identified certain parts, such as the thief on the right, to have been executed by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The large majority of the composition however he attributes to a talented member of the master's workshop.

1.  See M.J. Friedländer, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London 1978, pp. 144-5, no. 377, reproduced.
2.  Ibid., p. 66, no. 5, reproduced.
3.  Ibid., p. 88, no. 92, reproduced.
4.  Ibid., p. 88, no. 95, reproduced.
5.  Ibid., p. 112, no. 218, reproduced.