An Old Master who echoes our times

Lucas Cranach’s ‘Apollo and Diana’ (c1530)

Our taste in Old Masters often tells us more about ourselves than fashions in contemporary art. El Greco was ignored until his exaggerations suddenly chimed with modernism in the 1900s. Caravaggio emerged from obscurity only when his streetwise dramas and androgynous sensibility echoed democratic, sexualised postwar culture. And now Lucas Cranach, little known beyond Germany even a few years ago, is becoming the Old Master for the early 21st century. Why?

Cranach’s first UK shows took place in 2007 at the Courtauld Institute, and in 2008 at the Royal Academy – its posters advertising his slinky nudes were nearly banned from London Underground. This autumn brings further major exhibitions: Lucas Cranach, the Other Renaissance at Rome’s Galleria Borghese is the first ever display of the artist in Italy; The World of Lucas Cranach, at Brussels’ BOZAR, then travelling to Paris, is his first retrospective in France or any Benelux country.

And last week, the Louvre, in a fund-raising drive unique in France, launched a website and Facebook appeal to buy Cranach’s spectacular, pellucid “The Three Graces” (1531). Contributors donating over €200 get a private view of the painting.

Wily, worldly, witty Cranach would have enjoyed the canny marketing; the Louvre for its part is convinced that “The Three Graces”, featuring a trio of nudes seen from the front, back and in profile, will become a star attraction. For while the motif pays lip service to classical ideals, these graces, their small, high breasts, nipped waists, rounded stomachs and elongated forms derived from Gothic models, are – like all Cranach’s nudes – erotic, sarcastic provocations.

Their nakedness is emphasised by Cranach’s additions of new fashions – thick necklaces, a feathered red hat – and by a deep black background offsetting their flesh. It is an interpretation of the antique which is, as the Louvre’s page says, “very personal, very strange, deliberately ironic”. This Cranach shares less with the earnest naturalism of his contemporaries Dürer and Holbein than with the manipulative glamour of John Currin or Jeff Koons.

The flashy hat, chunky choker, almond-eyed stare and glassy skin all reappear in “Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief”, painted – several times – in the same year as “The Three Graces”, and a signature work in both Rome and Brussels. Each painting turns on the joke that the goddess incites the viewer to precisely the indulgence that has reduced Cupid to misery.

An inscription warns that pain follows pleasure: Cranach, chief artist of the Reformation, knew how to deliver a frisson of sensual delight wrapped in a parable. His sophisticated clientele relished the layers of painterly and intellectual engagement: images like “Venus and Cupid” – at least 15 versions exist – helped make him the richest citizen, and mayor, of Wittenberg.

Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese, who acquired his “Venus and Cupid” in 1611, hung it next to Andrea del Brescianino’s painting of the goddess, to dramatise differences between northern and classical ideals of beauty. That distinction is the theme of Rome’s show. His wedding portrait of Luther and his wife Katharina, for example, is a dry, medieval representation: to convey so shocking an image as that of a monk marrying a nun, Cranach understood, demanded a conventional format. For his depiction of Luther’s elderly parents, on the other hand, his mastery of tactile realism comes into play: a northern, earthy, bourgeois portrait.

‘The Melancholy’ (1553)

In contrast again, Cranach’s dreamy, rapt, round-faced Madonnas recall those of Bellini and Raphael. And in the supreme Frankfurt version, his sinuous “Venus” echoes Botticelli’s. Yet where the Italian is concerned with pure form, Cranach weaves calculated narrative. His Venus, a 16th-century material girl swirling her transparent veil, is an emblem of lasciviousness. Neatly, Cranach pairs her with a “Lucretia”, depicted with similar gestures but suggesting the opposite – writhing mental agony after the assault on her chastity.

Forty variants on “Lucretia” emerged from Cranach’s studio; other subjects were as frequently reworked, which is why it is possible for two exhibitions to run concurrently. Brussels seeks to place Cranach in context, and includes work by contemporaries to illustrate influences. The heart of Brussels’ presentation is the early work, so bizarre in its iconographic solutions, graphic harshness and unusual coloration. Budapest’s “Martyrdom of St Catherine” steals this show too: for its grotesque detail of tumbling bodies; its hideous jester-executioner unsheathing his sword; and the saffron-orange hues of some of its richly robed figures contrasted with the cold blue-white sky above them.

Vienna’s “Crucifixion”, Cranach’s first acknowledged work, is a similar balance of the distorted and the ornamental. Woodcuts on the same subject, published in 1502, feature broken trees from which the thieves dangle at impossibly crooked angles; branches shoot out like human limbs, as if nature is spreading itself in sympathy with the tormented bodies.

For centuries, art historians could not forgive Cranach for abandoning that awkward, fierce, early approach in favour of the smooth, crafty, later style easily imitated in his prolific workshop. The Renaissance factory artist par excellence, he was an innovator who, like Warhol or Koons, seized the commercial potential of working in series, and turned images into icons. Where El Greco and Caravaggio were isolated geniuses, Cranach was a society artist who did not separate art from business, or expressiveness from irony. His creations still please, but his most fascinating message today is how he has become one of us.

‘Cranach, L’Altro Rinascimento’, Galleria Borghese, Rome, to February 13; ‘L’Univers de Lucas Cranach’, BOZAR, Brussels, to January 23; Musée de Luxembourg, Paris, February 9-May 23