But what you see, moving from Durer in 1504 to Cranach in 1526, is how German artists warped this classical ideal by fusing it with a heritage that went back into the middle ages and even to primitive, pre-Christian times, to produce a bizarre, twisted version of Renaissance art. You feel the savage wilderness outside the walled towns in Cranach's pictures, the wild Wald beyond. Some of his most stunning works are hunting scenes, and this show includes a tremendous print of a theme he takes to lunatic lengths in paintings of mass hunts in which men and women of the court fire bows and arrows at stags and boars.
Beautiful drawings of these animals, featured in this exhibition, show how intimate Cranach became with the world of the hunt, giving rough magic to his mythological scenes. A faun and his family live in a very Germanic tangle of fir forest. Diana sits on a stag like the ones his masters hunted. This insistence on rooting myth in reality makes Adam and Eve, and the myth of the Fall, Cranach's perfect subject.
Cranach painted his Adam and Eve in 1526, not just in the year he became godfather to Luther's child, but also in the aftermath of the Reformation's most violent crisis, the German Peasant War, a popular rising sparked by Luther's writings. Luther called for the peasants to be massacred, which they were. It was a moment to reflect darkly on the sinful and depraved nature of human beings. But what makes us so wicked? Our desire. A Protestant painter might therefore take more liberty than a Catholic one to portray the bodies and poses he finds arousing - and that's what Cranach does. His Eve is tempting him, as he paints her. That's why the dirtiness of desire clings to his art, after 500 years. He makes the Renaissance feel bad and wrong.
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