Lucas Cranach liked underarms. Twice he painted a woman reaching up to a branch with her left arm, exposing the flesh under her shoulder. Why that hollow fascinated him is a secret long lost, but it is the sort of detail that makes this German Renaissance artist's depictions of the female nude revolutionary. Cranach was not the first artist to paint women naked, but he may be the first to have made it obvious he wanted to go to bed with them. With his taste for stagey sadomasochism - he painted Judith and Salome as snake-eyed slayers of men - and his penchant for tight-laced garments, he was the Helmut Newton of the 16th century.
There's something decadent and ignoble about Cranach. His paintings make me gawp. I can't get over the eroticism of his Cupid Complaining to Venus. Beside the skinny goddess of love, for all the world like a model in a 21st-century fashion magazine, is her son Cupid, who's being attacked by bees. It comes with a verse that explains this (in case you hadn't guessed) as an image of desire's inevitable punishment: "While the boy Cupid plunders honey from the hive, the bee fastens on his finger with a piercing sting ... the brief and fleeting pleasure which we seek is hurtful, mingled as it is with wretched pain."
Yet - and this is what keeps me coming back - the painting is a lot more ambivalent than a literal reading of the emblem might suggest. Cranach's Venus is so insistently sexual, with her wide hat and chunky necklace setting off those little breasts, that narrow waist, those long thighs. She has something about her of an emaciated sinner in a medieval depiction of hell, and yet the feeling the painting creates, outrageously, is that hell has its delights. Sex is dirty, and that's why we enjoy it, says Cranach.
Well, he had this on excellent theological authority: his best friend was Martin Luther, leader of the Reformation, who believed that no one could be saved by good works or charity, because humankind was irredeemably corrupted by the fall of Adam and Eve. Our sinful nature is too dark and evil for our own efforts to win God's forgiveness; it comes instead as gratuitous grace, and only for a few. Cranach was godfather to Luther's first child.
Why isn't Cranach a more revered and famous figure? Well, Cranach is difficult, even if you realize the greatness of German Renaissance art, because of his sheer productiveness. Paintings by him fill galleries all over Europe. He was a court artist in what by then was already an old-fashioned way, churning out hunting scenes and portraits with the help of an efficient workshop. Where his rival Albrecht Durer mythologized himself as a Christ-like redeemer of humanity and dramatized the anguish of creativity in his print Melencolia I, Cranach's personality vanishes in professionalism.
This is why the new exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery - which takes a sharp look at Cranach's obsession with sex and death in a selection of nudes painted around 1526, at the height of the Reformation - is a brilliant idea. It makes the real man emerge from the sheer scale of his output.
Durer almost steals it, however, with his engraving Adam and Eve, which somehow gives mere printed paper the weight of marble. Dated, on the tablet hanging from a tree in Paradise, to 1504, this is the grandest German attempt to absorb the Italian Renaissance; the nude figures of Adam and Eve are modeled on classical Greek statues with even, restrained physiques, balanced limbs and poses. Here Durer expresses the cult of the proportionate nude to icy perfection.
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