Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Lucas Cranach the Elder
German; 16th-century
Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada
92%
Venus. c1518. Oil on canvas
All of Cranach's genius is contained in that stretch of veil that's suspended, stiff above this picture's darkness, as it slips from Venus' hand. It's an object undeniably, a column of pure matter setting itself, for definition, against a neutral surface which it names but also, in so doing, subjugates — but it is somehow, too, not uncomplicatedly a figure upon a ground, insofar as its translucence brings all the black that's behind it forward at the same time as it sets it back in space. And in its vertical orientation, that bit of sheer fabric rhymes with columnar Venus, who likewise defines herself against the background without really subordinating it to herself. Like an old icon, this image has a ground with just as much presence as the figure it's there to convey; but like a modern portrait, it has a figure who's emergent, who bodies herself out towards the front of the image and thereby isn't simply its synonym. How Cranach managed this, it's not possible to convey. But it has something to do with how minimal yet well-defined that plinth of dirt is on which Venus stands; with the variety of colors comprising her skin, yet the suggestion her body makes of tonal unity against that dark expanse; with the contrapposto below her waist that corrects itself into trunklike surety by the time you arrive at her shoulders; with the big toe on her right foot, which is millimeters from popping out of the painting, but decides against it. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
89%
The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara. c1510. Oil on linen
The massing here is somehow off. Four figures clumped stiffly to the left — halved by a vertical halberd that's the scene's only straight solid thing — are thrust back and over by an arcing primary action (sword-swipe) which, reciprocally, they decenter and minimize. This seems in service of enframing Barbara, knelt right at the picture's edge. She herself is a mess of visual contradictions, the total mass of her pointing pyramidally up but every comprising triangle (folded legs, clasped hands, necklace, bosom) plunging towards the ground, whether left- or rightwards. Maybe this signals some kind of correspondence between the earthly and the transcendent, but more so it makes for a ganglion of shooting planes much more complex than the corpulent Teutonic formality of Cranach's modeling initially suggests. Still, it's a complexity constrained, hemmed-in by the half-rhombus made up of executioner and attendants. The landscape shifts and leans to accommodate the structure of these human actions. (TFS, 2023)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
75%
The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara. c1510. Oil on linen
This painting succeeds more in its small, strange details than in its totality, which is what makes it a minor Cranach. Some of those details: the veinous hands of Mary; her veil's delicacy, in particular those soft lines running down it; the placement of (what I assume is) Cranach's sinew of a signature in the dark space between the virgin's elbow and her knee; that signature's affinity with the scrawled decoration on Mary's cuffs, as well as with the highlights in both figures' hair; the vitreous roundness and solidity of the grapes (the one Christ is holding looks like the world). Taken together, though, all of these features amount to just about the sum of their parts, not much more. Christ and Mary sit somehow too steadily upon that dark ground behind them, and they take up too much of the total volume of the picture. There's little tension, too, in the way both lean left. (TFS, 2025)