The Master of the Piasecka Johnson Madonna

In 1906 in the home of the prelate of Lilienfeld Abbey, Austria;

With Eugene V. Thaw, New York;

Acquired from the above in 1981 by the present owner.

Warsaw, Royal Castle, Opus Sacrum, 10 April – 31 July 1990, no. 20.

H. Tietze, 'Ein Bild aus der Werkstätte Lukas Cranachs', in Mitteilungen der K. K. Zentralkommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und Historischen Denkmale, 3. F. vol. V, Vienna 1906, pp. 176–79, reproduced fig. 61;

A. S. Labuada, in J. Grabski ed., catalogue of the exhibition Opus Sacrum, Vienna 1990, pp. 124–129, no. 20.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Lucas Cranach the Elder. Madonna and Child. Dated 1522. This panel has one central joint. It has been cradled probably in the middle of the last century, and although the faintest trace of curves between cradle bar lines can be seen in a raking light in some places, the cradle has not caused any marked reaction in the original wood, which is remarkably well preserved with no past worm damage. The outer edges of the panel have a narrow unpainted band with some residual priming, from the original structure holding it on the easel. The extraordinary preservation of this painting suggests an exceptionally peaceful, stable background and early history. There has been a recent restoration, with minimal retouching. The central joint has evidently been reglued and there is a band of careful retouching down its full length including the Madonna's eye on the left. Elsewhere however scarcely any other retouching can be seen under ultra violet light. There is one narrow slanting line presumably an old crack or scratch (about five inches long) at the top of the sky on the right, with one other tiny scratch by the horizon on the left. Several brief little old cracks come up from the base edge near the centre on either side of the central joint. There are also one or two surface retouchings in the red drapery at lower right. But these are negligeable imperfections in a quite exceptionally intact painting. The craquelure is extremely fine throughout and the surface has remained crisply defined and pure down to the smallest detail. Within the landscape each leaf is unworn and luminous, as is the beautifully glazed drapery throughout. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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Almost completely unknown until first exhibited some twenty years ago, this is a German High Renaissance panel of great beauty and no little importance, not only in its size and exceptional state of preservation, but equally in the detail and rich colour of its design. In a beautiful sunlit landscape, the Virgin Mary is shown seated on a grassy bank, with the Christ Child standing on her lap. She tenderly offers Him some grapes, while behind them the landscape spreads out past a single tree, leading across lakeside houses and bridges and pastures towards a distant hill top castle. The details of all the flora and fauna and all the distant buildings in the landscape are painted with the utmost clarity and precision in clear, bright colours.

The subject of Maria auf der Rasenbank or the Virgin on a grassy bank, stemmed from a combination of two earlier Marian iconographic themes, the Madonna of Humility and the Madonna in the Rose garden. The grassy bank and the posture of the Virgin seated upon it are symbolic of Mary’s humility, while the grapes that she proffers her Son are symbolic of the blood of Christ and hence forewarn of His Passion to come. Iconographically this type, with the Virgin seated full-length in a landscape, was derived in German art from the earlier work of Martin Schongauer (circa 1440–91) and particularly Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), who had both explored the theme in a series of woodcuts and engravings from the 1480s onwards, notably the former’s engraving of the same subject of 1480–81 (fig. 2) and the latter’s Holy Family with a dragonfly of 1494–96 (fig. 3).  

Stylistically, this painting has always been closely associated with the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder, and there can be little doubt that its author must have been closely acquainted with his work and may well have trained in his workshop. The facial types of both Virgin and Child and the landscape setting are both very reminiscent of Cranach’s style. Hans Tietsche, who was the first to publish this picture in 1906, immediately underlined its evident affinity with Cranach’s paintings of the Virgin and Child from the second decade of the sixteenth century.¹ In an early panel of 1510 in the Thyssen Collection, for example, and again in a lost panel of 1518, Cranach depicted the Virgin and the naked Child at half-length, before a landscape, framed on one side by a tree and to the other by a castle upon a distant outcrop.² In the first of these, we find the theme of the Virgin offering grapes to the infant Jesus, a Eucharistic motif to which Cranach would return throughout his career. The motif of the Christ Child standing upon his mother’s lap is perhaps less frequent, but is to be found in another panel from the early to mid-1520s today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.³ In stylistic terms therefore, the date of 1522 on the present panel would seem entirely consistent with a knowledge of Cranach’s work at this date. Few paintings by Cranach depicting the Virgin and Child on the grass bank at full-length seem to be known, but one such is to be found in the University of Arizona Art Gallery, Tucson, Arizona, which once formed the central panel of a triptych, whose wings are now in the Moravian Gallery of Brno in the Czech Republic.⁴ The prototype for this design was once again Dürer, in this case the engraving of the Madonna of the Pear of 1511. Dieter Koepplin has also kindly pointed out parallels with a drawing of this subject from the Cranach workshop in the Universitätsbibliothek in Erlanger, which can be dated after 1514 due to its evident reliance upon Dürer’s engraving of The Madonna by the Wall.⁵ He further points out that the very distinctive and detailed treatment of the foliage in the present panel can be found in two altar wing panels depicting Saints Catherine and Barbara now in the Archiepiscopal Palace in Kroměříž in the Czech Republic, which are also generally considered to be products of the Cranach workshop.⁶ The curiously elongated figures of the two saints, however, do not suggest the same hand as that in the Piasecka Johnson Madonna. Werner Schade has also very kindly drawn our attention to a drawing of the Virgin and Child at full-length in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which he believes to be the work of Cranach the Elder himself (fig. 1).⁷ Like the Erlanger drawing, this too follows Dürer's print of 1514, but its autograph status has not always been accepted.

Given these numerous parallels with the work of Lucas Cranach we might surmise that the Master of the Piasecka Johnson Madonna may perhaps have worked in Saxony. His precise identity, however, remains as elusive as ever. The monogram on the stone in the lower left corner has been read variously as an E or perhaps as the letters L and C interlocked. In both size and conception the present panel is unusually bold among German early sixteenth-century panels of this type, and its mastery of detail is not readily paralleled elsewhere.

 

 

 

1. In 1949, Max J. Friedländer proposed an attribution to Cranach himself, but this has not been followed by any later scholars. Letter dated Amsterdam 23 October 1949. Cited by Grabski, Literature, 1990, p. 126.

2. For which see respectively M. J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, under Literature, 1978, pp. 75, 87, nos 30 and 88, reproduced.

3. Friedländer and Rosenberg, op. cit., 1978, p. 102, no. 163.

4. Ibid., pp. 78–79, nos. 46 and 47.

5. Inv. no. B 1317. Reproduced in A. Tacke, Cranach. Meisterwerke auf Vorrat. Die Erlanger Handzeichnungen der Universitätbibliothek, Erlanger 1994, no. 86. Werner Schade has also kindly drawn our attention to another drawing attributed to Cranach or his school in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

6. Friedländer and Rosenberg, op. cit., 1978, p. 84, no. 74c.  

7. Inv. 282, K. T. Parker, Catalogue of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. I, Oxford 1938, p. 121.