Lucas Cranach the Elder

Jenny Klever, Leverkusen;

Anonymous sale, Cologne, Lempertz, 10 December 1990, lot  22, where acquired by the present owner.

Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum, Cranach, 23 November 2007 – 17 February 2008, no. 1

B. Brinkmann, in Cranach, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007–2008, p. 112, no. 1.

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. Landscape. This painting is on small panel, which might have formed part of a larger work but is beautifully complete in itself. It has been cradled, probably at the turn of the twentieth century, but shows no sign of movement past or present - a brief crack from the top on the right is insignificant. One tiny recent superficial scratch can be seen near the base of the tree trunk. The exquisite condition must reflect an exceptionally peaceful historical background, with scarcely any trace of intervention or wear of any sort. Perhaps a minor surface retouching on the tower at the crest of the hill is among the rare signs of old retouching just visible, with a few tiny darkened touches in the sky above it, and minute clusters of darkened touches around the deep blue clouds above and at the extreme top edge. The fine craquelure is undisturbed throughout, as is the minute detail for instance in the little town in the lower distance, with every blade of grass and highlight on every leaf in the bushes on the hillside, or in the great tree silhouetted against the sky, all remain perfectly intact. Even a minute horseman riding up the path is undisturbed, as is the swan and the finest reflections in the water below, with the luminous colour and light preserved in complete purity 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."

This remarkable little panel is eloquent testament to a much overlooked facet of Lucas Cranach’s art. From his very earliest works onwards, landscape was an essential component of Cranach’s artistic vocabulary, and formed an integral part of his approach to his work. Cranach’s interest in, and use of, landscape grew from his formative years in Vienna and its surrounding regions around 1500, when he began to assign it a vital new role by emphasising its dramatic and expressive possibilities. This pioneering approach would pave the way for artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Jorg Breu and Wolf Huber, the so-called Danube school of painters, who came to dominate painting in Bavaria and Upper Austria in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Although Cranach’s own style did not sustain the mannerist heights sought by these contemporaries, landscape remained a key element of his work throughout his life.

This particular fragment probably originally served as part of the background to one of Cranach’s many depictions of figures such as the Virgin and Child or Saint Jerome within landscape settings. The foreground is dominated by a tall deciduous tree, behind which stands a fortified castle atop a rocky bluff, looking out over a town in a river valley. This combination of elements recurs in the backgrounds of many of Cranach’s paintings, and the hilltop Schloss with its precarious necessarium was no doubt based upon contemporary structures such as the Wartburg in Thuringia, where his friend the reformer Martin Luther went into hiding after the Diet of Worms in 1521. Good examples of similar landscapes include the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist of about 1515 in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Kroměřiz or the Virgin and Child in a landscape of 1518, formerly in the Cathedral at Glogow in Poland.¹ Alternatively, this panel might originally have formed the view from an open window used often by Cranach to enliven interior scenes. A similar prospect, for example,  may be seen in a panel of Lucretia of 1518 in the Veste Coburg Fürstenbau.² Brinckmann and Dette assign a slightly later dating to the present panel to the years 1525–30, when Cranach was well established in Wittenberg as court painter to the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Despite its fragmentary nature, this panel remains remarkably well preserved, and together with its small scale, this permits a closer appreciation of this important aspect of Cranach's art.

 

1. M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London 1978, pp. 84, 87, nos 73 and 88, reproduced.

2. Friedländer and Rosenberg 1978, p. 94,  no. 121.