A visual Journey into the Bible The Book of Genesis

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A Visual Journey into the Bible Page: 24 Chapel, the Pauline Chapel and finally the ‘Last Judgement’ of the Sistine Chapel. He also wrote sonnets and poems, some of which were love poems to Vittoria Colonna, the Marchese de Pescara. Michelangelo appears to us as a tower of a man, an all-genius artist, architect and engineer such as the world has not seen after him. He was a man who could do everything, a shaper of civilisation. He was impregnated with the spirituality of Roman Catholic religion, but he added a new dimension: the power of man, and the confidence, the triumph of man’s deeds. Adam and Eve Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). The Courtauld Institute Galleries - London. Ca.1526. The Italian Renaissance had started around 1400 in Italy, even though the first pictures of its sparkle came a quarter of a century later. From Italy the new ideas moved northward. Thus it reached Germany earlier than Flanders, Brabant and Holland maybe because the Gothic tradition was stronger and more brilliant in these last regions. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) were contemporaries. Dürer was totally open to international ideas in art and philosophy. He was a traveller. He went twice to Italy to study art and confer with Italian artists. He also went to Flanders and Holland. His style was courteous, refined, complex and delicate. But he was also a passionate man and a man who doubted and was uncertain of himself at times. His terrible engravings of the Apocalypse prove this. Dürer was the intellectual of the two. Lucas Cranach the Elder was more linked to his region. Cranach never travelled to Italy. He was rooted in popular German art, German character and morals. He perpetuated the spirit of the German soil. He knew the splendour of the Renaissance. He painted mythological scenes, especially his sensual Venuses. He knew the Renaissance’s glorification of the human body but he did not want to leave the tradition of old to seemingly naively paint stylised images. He made a gradual transition to Renaissance, whereas Dürer jumped without neither bonds nor complexes nor restraint immediately into the new vision. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted an ‘Adam and Eve’ around 1526, after an etching of Dürer. U4. Cranach used Dürer’s poises in several pictures. We notice the grace of Dürer, and his freedom in composition as compared to earlier Gothic, as well as Cranach’s links with traditional German representation clearly in this picture. In Cranach’s picture man and woman are indeed the focus of attention and landscape is still in the background, as one would expect of Renaissance and Gothic painters. Adam and Eve are pictured in attitudes that explain the scene of the Bible. Eve is still grasping a branch of the Tree of Knowledge and in a gesture further in time hands over the apple to Adam. Her poise is coquettish and her long legs show some of the sensuality of the spectator-artist Cranach. Yet, her forms remain spiritualised in a restraint that is respectful as necessary for a religious scene. Eve’ forms are barely accentuated by shadows; her body is the pale colour of a fleshless symbol. Cranach showed more distance than the bold Dürer. Adam accepts the apple but he scratches Copyright ©: René Dewil Date: October, 24 2000
A Visual Journey into the Bible Page: 25 his head in doubt. He is not sure whether he should accept the apple and also give in to the temptation of the sensuous, sinuous snake above. This serpent has the colour of deceit: it is as green as the tree so as to blend in its environment, but it has a gold gleam of success. The serpent’s head is definitely directed at Eve. Around the first couple all the animals are still in peace with each other because the apple of the Original Sin has not yet been eaten. The animals seem to await the disaster that will disturb their harmony. They all stand still, as if frozen in expectation and intuition of something important that is going to happen. Lion and deer glance sadly at the viewer and confront him directly with the fearful expectation of the act that will kill. Cranach needed to add a small pond to be able to picture in water birds. The drinking of the pond is like the eating of the apple, and eating and drinking are the two activities of the sustentation of living. Behind Eve, in the far, a white horse is galloping out of the forest. The horse is white and could be the unicorn of the legends, an emblem of purity. The horse is the only animal that is in motion and it tries to leave Eden, because the Fall is being prepared. The result of sin will be the multiplication of man, necessary to perpetrate the sin and necessary to continue man since Adam and Eve will become mortal creatures. Cranach represents this symbolically by growing the ranks of a vine to both the sexual parts of Adam and Eve. From these blooms the fruit, the grapes. The woods of the deer beneath Adam support Adam’s sex and the spikes of the horns are a reference to the pain that will be induced by the Fall. Such immediate reference to sexuality was unusual for refined painters, but Cranach did this also in other pictures such as in his Saint Sebastian. Cranach hereby remained closer to earth, to popular images instead of to the refinement of intellectual art. Remarkable in this picture is not just the narrative, the various gestures of Adam and Eve that tell a story in static poises. Gothic is turning into Renaissance in this picture. Gothic’s static becomes movement. The emphasis on symbols and references is still medieval, but the figures of Adam and Eve are new in that Eve is really alluring. But her image remains stylised. So are the bushes behind the couple that form a screen behind their scene. All leaves are equally large; all apples are identical. Only after sin will there be decay and still more variety in nature. Such depiction may be considered naïve and indeed, naïve artists of the nineteenth century used the same representation as Cranach did. We need to understand that we have here a master as accomplished as Albrecht Dürer at work. But Cranach deliberately stayed with a very personal vision, in symbiosis with his common fellow men of the small towns of Germany. It is a very Protestant and German reaction to refuse the splendours of the Renaissance. Lucas Cranach was a friend of Martin Luther and made an altarpiece for the Wittenberg chapel where Luther preached. He also painted several portraits of Luther and his wife. Lucas Cranach worked in Wittenberg, as he had been invited there from Nuremberg by Frederick the Wise, the Prince-Elector of Sachsen. He had a workshop in Wittenberg and was elected three times mayor of the town. Lucas Cranach painted Adam and Eve in the nude. So did Dürer before him, as well as Mariotto Albertinelli in an oil painting that is equally in the Courtauld Institute of London. Dürer’s etchings had reached Italy rapidly. Jan Van Eyck had painted Adam and Eve as explicitly naked even earlier. The nakedness would shock generations later, but the early days of the sixteenth century was still the time before the Council Copyright ©: René Dewil Date: October, 24 2000
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A visual Journey into the Bible The Book of Genesis

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