Galleria Borghese. Lucas Cranach: The Other Renaissance. Rome, from October 15th 2010 to February 13th 2011. EXTENDED UNTIL 3Th MARCH

Condividi Lucas Cranach (1472‐1553) is perhaps best known in art history as a friend and supporter of Martin Luther, at whose wedding he was the best man and with whom he laid the foundations of a Protestant iconology.

The court painter to Frederick the Wise of Saxony for all of fifty years and head of a large and very busy studio in Wittenberg, Cranach also introduced other subjects into German painting, especially a new imagery of the nude and the erotic, as well as humanistic themes and a particularly incisive and innovative portraiture: classical subjects with a new look that was “non‐classical”, captivating, sensual, and brilliantly painted. Cranach was a leading figure of “another Renaissance”, which was different from the classicism theorized and practiced by his great contemporary Albrecht Dürer, as well as from the Italian Renaissance.

He was a court artist, but in an innovative way: one who was able to establish a completely new and visually very attractive formal language.
The exhibition aims to provide an overall view of the artistic production of a Renaissance painter, court artist and innovator who was attached to the Flemish tradition, but also influenced by the new developments in Italian painting.

The Galleria Borghese will host about 45 of Cranach’s most significant works, which come from the leading public collections in Europe and the United States. Several of them will be shown for the first time outside their permanent collection, while ten woodcuts demonstrate Cranach’s incredible virtuosity and inventiveness in the graphic medium.

The exhibition in Rome aims in particular to broach and investigate a question that is still open, i.e. the relationship between Cranach’s oeuvre and Italian Renaissance art at that time.

While it is clear, on the one hand, that Cranach’s artistic canon developed in a way that was essentially different from, and almost antithetical to, the classicizing Italian” norm, on the other an undeniable iconographic and semantic convergence can be noted between Cranach’s rendering of several subjects and those of Italian painters such as Bartolomeo Veneto, Francesco Francia, Bachiacca, Perugino, Vincenzo Catena, Palma il Vecchio, Andrea Solario, Lorenzo Lotto, and Jacopo de’ Barbari, his predecessor as court painter to Frederick the Wise. The “epoch‐making” encounter in Augsburg in 1550 between Titian, the foremost portraitist of the Habsburgs, and Cranach, court painter to all of three consecutive electors of Saxony, emphasized the differences rather than the similarities, but it gives rise to further reflections on the two masters’ ideas about portraits.

Several examples exemplifying the complex “dialectical” relations between Cranach and the world of Italian painting will be presented in the exhibition, with significant works from the Galleria Borghese’s collection and additional ones for comparative purposes – by Lorenzo Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, and Titian – from other collections, both in Italy and abroad.

The exhibition thus aims to provide an overall view of Lucas Cranach’s varied artistic activity, with important novelties concerning critical and contextual interpretation. In this regard, in addition to the curators, several of the world’s leading experts on the subject will contribute to the catalogue. The structure of the exhibition and the catalogue is not organized chronologically, but typologically and thematically in seven sections: The Court Artist, People’s Faces, The Power of Women, Faith, Female Sensuality, and Prints.