Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

IV. CRANACH AND THE GERMANS

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German ecclesiastical architecture went in hiding during the

Reformation. No new churches were raised to art as well as piety; many

churches were left unfinished; many were pulled down, and princely

castles were put together with their stones. Protestant churches

dedicated themselves to a stern simplicity; Catholic churches, as if

in defiance, ran to excessive ornament while the Renaissance moved

into the baroque.

Civic and palace architecture replaced cathedrals as dukes

replaced bishops and the state enveloped the Church. Some

picturesque civic structures of this period were casualties of the

second World War: the Althaus in Brunswick, the House of the Butchers'

Guild at Hildesheim, the Renaissance-style Rathaus or Town Hall of

Nymegen. The most pretentious architecture of this and the next age

took the form of immense castles for the territorial princes:

Dresden Castle, which cost the people 100,000 florins ($2,500,000?);

the palace of Duke Christopher at Stuttgart, so lavish in fixtures and

furniture that the city magistrates warned the Duke that the luxury of

his court was scandalously in contrast with the poverty of his people;

and the vast Heidelberg Castle, begun in the thirteenth century,

rebuilt in Renaissance fashion in 1556-63, and partly destroyed in the

second World War.

The art crafts retained their excellence in the service of

princes, nobles, merchants, and financiers. Cabinetmakers,

woodcutters, ivory-cutters, engravers, miniaturists, textile

workers, ironworkers, potters, goldsmiths, armorers, jewelers- all had

the old medieval skills, though they tended to sacrifice taste and

form to complexity of ornament. Many painters drew designs for

woodcuts as carefully as if they were making portraits of kings; and

woodcutters like Hans Lutzeburger of Basel labored with the devotion

of a Durer. The goldsmiths of Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna were at

the top of their line; Wenzel Jamnitzer might have challenged Cellini.

About 1547 German artists began to paint glass with enamel colors;

in this way vessels and windows took on crude but rich designs, and

the prosperous bourgeois could have his likeness fused into the

windowpanes of his home.

German sculptors kept their preference for metal statuary and

reliefs. The sons of Peter Vischer carried on his craft: Peter the

Younger cast a bronze plaque of Orpheus and Eurydice; Hans

designed a handsome Apollo Fountain for the court of the Nuremberg

town hall; Paul is usually credited with a pretty figure in wood,

known as The Nuremberg Madonna. Peter Flotner of Nuremberg cast

excellent reliefs of Envy, Justice, Saturn, and the Muse of Dance. One

of the most delightful objects in the Louvre is a bust, by Joachim

Deschler, of Otto Heinrich, Count Palatine, six and a half inches

high, and nearly as wide in its corpulence, with a face formed by

years of bon appetit; this is German humor at its broadest.

The glory of German art continued to be in painting. Holbein equaled

Durer, Cranach followed on their heels, and Baldung Grien,

Altdorfer, and Amberger formed a creditable second line. Hans

Baldung Grien made his fame with an altarpiece for the cathedral of

Freiburg-im-Breisgau; but more attractive is The Madonna with the

Parrot - a buxom Teuton with golden hair, and a parrot pecking at

her cheeks. Christopher Amberger painted some elegant portraits; the

Lille Museum has his Charles V, sincere, intelligent, incipiently

fanatical; the Chicago Art Institute's Portrait of a Man is a finely

chiseled, gentle face. Albrecht Altdorfer stands out in this minor

group by the richness of his landscapes. In his St. George the

knight and the dragon are almost unseen in an entourage of crowding

trees; even The Battle of Arbela loses the warring hosts in an

abundance of towers, mountains, waters, clouds, and sun. These, and

the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, are among the first true landscapes

in modern painting.

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Lucas Cranach the Elder took his name from his native town, Kronach,

in Upper Franconia. We know almost nothing further of him till his

appointment, at the age of thirty-two, as court painter to Elector

Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg (1504). He kept his position at the

Saxon court, there or at Weimar, for nearly fifty years. He met

Luther, liked him, pictured him again and again, and illustrated

some of the Reformer's writings with caricatures of the popes;

however, he made portraits also of Catholic notables like the Duke

of Alva and Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. He had a good business head,

turned his studio into a factory of portraits and religious paintings,

sold books and drugs on the side, became burgomaster of Wittenberg

in 1565, and died full of money and years.

The Italian influence had by this time reached Wittenberg. It

appears in the grace of Cranach's religious pictures, more visibly

in his mythologies, most in his nudes. Now, as in Italy, the pagan

pantheon competes with Mary, Christ, and the saints, but German

humor enlivens the traditional by making fun of safely dead gods. In

Cranach's Judgment of Paris the Trojan seducer goes to sleep while

the shivering beauties wait for him to wake and judge. In Venus and

Cupid the goddess of love is shown in her usual nudity, except for an

enormous hat- as if Cranach were slyly suggesting that desire is so

formed by custom that it can be stilled by an unwonted accessory.

Nevertheless Venus proved popular, and Cranach, with help, issued

her in a dozen forms to shine in Frankfurt, Leningrad, the Borghese

Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.... In Frankfurt she hides her

charms revealingly behind a dozen gossamer threads; these serve

again for the Lucretia in Berlin, who cheerfully prepares to

redeem her honor with a bare bodkin. The same lady posed for The

Nymph of the Spring (New York), lying on a bed of green leaves beside

a pool. In the Geneva Museum she becomes Judith, no longer nude, but

dressed to kill, holding her sword over Holofernes' severed head,

which winks humorously at its mischance. Finally the lady, re-bared,

becomes Eve in Das Paradies at Vienna, in Adam and Eve at Dresden,

in Eve and the Serpent in Chicago, where a handsome stag joins and

names her party. Nearly all these nudes have some quality that saves

them from eroticism- an impish humor, a warmth of color, an Italian

finesse of line, or an unpatriotic slenderness in the female

figures; here was a brave attempt to reduce the Frau.

The portraits that poured from Cranach's hand or aides are more

interesting than his stereotyped nudes, and some rival Holbein's.

Anna Cuspinian is realism tempered with delicacy, gorgeous robes,

and a balloon hat; the husband, Johannes Cuspinian, sat for a still

finer portrait- all the idealism of a young humanist reflected in

the meditative eyes and symbolized in the book fondly clasped. A

hundred dignitaries were preserved in paint or chalk in this popular

atelier, but none so well deserves survival as the child Prince

of Saxony (Washington), all innocence and gentleness and golden

curls. At the other side of life is the portrait of Dr. Johannes

Schoner, terrible in features, noble in artistry. And here and

there, in Cranach's work, are magnificent animals, all pedigreed,

and stags so natural that- claimed a friend- "dogs barked when they

saw them." `063618

Cranach might have been greater had he not succeeded so soon and

well. The multiplication of his patrons divided his genius; he had

no time to give all of it to any one task. Inevitably, as his

eighty-one years rolled by, he tired and slacked down; the drawing,

once as fine as Durer's, became careless, details were shirked, the

same faces, nudes, and trees were repeated to lifelessness. In the end

we have to agree with the judgment passed on the early Cranach by

the aging Durer- that Lucas could depict the features but not the

soul. `063619

In 1550, when he was seventy-eight, he painted his own

portrait: a

stout councilor and merchant rather than painter and engraver, with

powerful square head, stately white beard, expansive nose, eyes full

of pride and character. Three years later he surrendered his flesh

to time. He left behind him three sons, all artists: John Lucas, Hans,

and Lucas the Younger, whose Sleeping Hercules transmitted a theme

from Rabelais to Swift by showing the giant peacefully ignoring the

darts with which the pigmies around him barely pierce his ectoderm.

Perhaps Lucas the Elder ignored as serenely the pricks of those who

condemned him for bourgeois ideals and unconscientious haste; and

under the tombstone that bears the ambiguous compliment Celerrimus

pictor - fastest painter- he sleeps well.

With him the great age of German painting passed. The basic cause of

the decline was more probably the intensity of religious dispute

than the Protestant repudiation of religious imagery. Possibly a moral

letdown coarsened German painting after 1520; nudes began to play a

leading role; and even in Biblical pictures painters ran to themes

like Suzanna and the Elders, Potiphar's wife tempting Joseph, or

Bathsheba in her bath. For two centuries after the death of Cranach

German art receded in the backwash of theology and war.

V. THE TUDOR STYLE: 1517-58

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The reign of Henry VIII began with a Gothic masterpiece in the

chapel of Henry VII, and closed with the Renaissance architecture of

royal palaces; the change of style aptly reflected the conquest of the

Church by the state. The attack of the government on the bishops,

the monasteries, and ecclesiastical revenues put an end to English

ecclesiastical architecture for almost a hundred years.

Henry VII, anticipating death, had allotted L140,000

($14,000,000?) to build in Westminster Abbey a Lady Chapel to

contain his tomb. It is a masterpiece not of construction but of

decoration, from the cenotaph itself to the intricate stone skein of

the fan vault, which has been called "the most wonderful work of

masonry ever put together by the hand of man." `063620 As the chapel

is Gothic in plan and Renaissance in adornment, we have here the

beginning of the Tudor or Florid Style. Henry VIII, as a young

humanist, was readily won to classical architectural forms. He and

Wolsey brought several Italian artists into England. One of them,

Pietro Torrigiano, was commissioned to design the paternal tomb.

Upon the sarcophagus of white marble and black stone the Florentine

sculptor laid lavish decoration in carvings or gilt bronze: plump

putti, floral wreaths of airy grace, reliefs of the Virgin and

divers saints, angels sitting atop the tomb and extending pretty

feet into space, and, over the whole, the recumbent figures of Henry

VII and his Queen Elizabeth. This was such sculpture as England had

never seen before, and in England it has never been surpassed. Here,

said Francis Bacon, the parsimonious King, who had pinched pennies

to spend pounds, "dwelleth more richly dead than he did alive in any

of his palaces." `063621

Henry VIII was not the man to allow anyone to be more sumptuously

buried than himself. In 1518 he contracted to pay Torrigiano L2,000

for a tomb "more greater by the fourth part" than his

father's. `063622 This was never finished, for the artist as well as

the King had a royal temper; Torrigiano left England in a huff (1519),

and when he returned he did no more work on the second tomb. Instead

he designed for Henry VII's chapel a high altar, reredos, and

baldachin, which Cromwell's men destroyed in 1643. In 1521

Torrigiano departed for Spain.

The mortal comedy was resumed in 1524 when Wolsey commissioned

another Florentine, Benedetto da Rovezzano, to build him a tomb in St.

George's Chapel at Windsor, "the design whereof," wrote Lord Herbert

of Cherbury, "was so glorious that it exceeded far that of Henry

VII." `063623 When the Cardinal fell he begged the King to let him

keep at least the effigy for a humbler tomb in York; Henry refused,

and confiscated the whole as a receptacle for himself; he bade the

artists replace Wolsey's figure with his own; but religion and

marriage distracted him, and the funereal monument was never

completed. Charles I wished to be buried in it, but a hostile

Parliament sold the decoration piece by piece, until only the black

marble sarcophagus remained, to serve at last (1810) as part of

Nelson's shrine in St. Paul's.

Aside from these labors, and the glorious wood screen and stalls and

stained glass and vault of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, the

memorable architecture of this age was dedicated to glorifying the

country houses of the aristocracy into fairy palaces rising amid the

fields and woods of England. The architects were English, but a

dozen Italians were enlisted for the decoration. An imposingly wide

facade in mixed Gothic and Renaissance, a turreted gateway leading

into a court, a spacious hall for crowded festivities, a massive

staircase, usually in carved wood, rooms adorned with murals or

tapestry and lighted with lattice windows or oriels, and, around the

buildings, a garden, a deer park, and, beyond, a hunting ground-

this was the English nobleman's skeptical forestalling of paradise.

The most famous of these Tudor manor houses was Hampton Court, built

by Wolsey (1515) for himself, and bequeathed in terror to his King

(1525). Not one architect but a coalition of English master builders

created it, basically in Perpendicular Gothic and on a medieval

plan, with moat and towers and crenellated walls; Giovanni da Maiano

added a Renaissance touch in terra-cotta roundels on the facade. The

Duke of Wurttemberg, visiting England in 1592, called Hampton Court

the most magnificent palace in the world. `063624 Only less

sumptuous were Sutton Place in Surrey, built (1521-27) for Sir Richard

Weston, and Nonesuch Palace, begun for Henry VIII in 1538 on an

imperial scale. "He invited thither," says an old description, "the

most excellent artificers, architects, sculptors, and statuaries of

different nations, Italians, Frenchmen, Hollanders, and native

Englishmen; and these presented a marvelous example of their art in

the decoration of the palace and both within and without adorned it

with statues which here recall in literal reproduction the ancient

works of Rome, and elsewhere surpass them in excellence." `063625

Two hundred and thirty men were constantly employed on this palace,

which was intended to outshine the Chambord and Fontainebleau of

Francis I. Seldom had English kings been so rich, or the English

people so poor. Henry died before Nonesuch could be finished.

Elizabeth made it her favorite residence; Charles II gave it to his

mistress Lady Castlemaine (1670), who had it pulled down, and sold the

parts, as the only way to transform a liability into an asset.

VI. HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER: 1497-1543

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How futile are words before a work of art! Each art successfully

resists translation into any other medium; it has its own

inalienable quality, which must speak for itself or not at all.

History can only record the masters and the masterpieces; it cannot

convey them. To sit silently before Holbein's picture of his wife

and children is better than a biography. However...

He was more fortunate in his parentage than in his time. His

father was among the leading painters in Augsburg. From him Hans

learned the elements of the art, and from Hans Burgkmair something

of Italian grace and modeling. In 1512 he painted four altar panels

now in the Augsburg Gallery- middling enough, but astonishingly good

for a lad of fifteen. Two years later he and his brother Ambrose, also

a painter, decamped to Basel. Perhaps the father had insisted too much

on his own- still Gothic- style; perhaps there was not enough educated

money in Augsburg to support more than a few artists; in any case

youth and genius seldom love home. In Basel the lads discovered that

freedom is a trial. Hans illustrated various volumes, including

Erasmus' Praise of Folly; he did some rough painter's work, made a

signboard for a schoolmaster, and decorated a table top with lively

incidents from the story of St. Nobody- that handy nonentity who was

charged with every anonymous mischief, and never said a word in his

own defense. The skill shown in this work earned Hans a fruitful

commission- to paint portraits of the burgomaster Jakob Meyer and

his wife (1517). The fame of these portraits traveled; Jakob

Hertenstein called Holbein to Lucerne, and there Hans frescoed the

facade and walls of the patron's home, and painted that portrait of

Benedict Hertenstein which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New

York. From Lucerne he may have passed into Italy; his work

henceforth revealed Italian influence in anatomical accuracy,

architectural backgrounds, and the management of light. When he

returned to Basel, aged twenty-two, he set up his own studio, and

married a widow (1519). In that year his brother died and in 1524

their father.

German realism mingled with Romanesque architecture and classic

ornament in the religious pictures that Holbein now produced.

Startling is the realism- echoing Mantegna- of Christ in the Tomb:

the body all bone and skin, the eyes ghastly open, the hair

disheveled, the mouth agape in a last effort to breathe; this seems

irrevocable death, and no wonder Dostoievski said the picture could

destroy a man's religious faith. `063626 About this time Holbein

painted murals for the hall of the Grand Council in Basel. The

councilors were pleased, and one of them commissioned him to provide

an altarpiece for a Carthusian monastery. This Passion of Christ

suffered in the iconoclastic riots of 1529, but two shutters were

saved, and were presented to the cathedral at Freiburg-im-Breisgau.

They borrow much from Baldung Grien, but they have their own power

in the remarkable play of the light that emanates from the Child. In

1522 the town clerk of Basel ordered another altarpiece; for this

placidly beautiful Madonna, now preserved in the Kunstmuseum of

Solothurn, Holbein used his wife and son as models- the wife then a

woman of modest comeliness, not yet touched by tragedy. Probably

near this time `063627 he produced his religious masterpiece, The

Virgin and Child with the Family of Burgomaster Meyer - splendid in

composition, line, and color, and intense in feeling; we understand

more sympathetically the Burgomaster's prayer to the Madonna when we

learn that at the time of this painting the two sons pictured at his

feet, and one of the two wives kneeling at the right, were dead.

But the fees for such religious pictures were small in proportion to

the care and labor they required. Portraits were more lucrative, and

there was a growing family to support. In 1519 Holbein painted the

young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach- a noble face, in which idealism

survives a penetrating view of the world. About 1522 he painted the

great printer Froben- a man dedicated, disturbed, creatively worn

out by life. Through Froben, Holbein came to know Erasmus; and in 1523

he painted two of his many portraits of the saddened humanist. In

the three-quarters portrait (in the Earl of Radnor's Collection at

Salisbury) the artist, now in the fullness of his powers, caught the

soul of a man who had lived too long; illness and Luther had

deepened the lines in the face, the melancholy in the eyes. The

profile in the Basel Kunstsammlung shows him calmer and more alive;

the nose advancing to battle like a gladiator's sword; perhaps the

manuscript under the pen is a draft of the De libero arbitrio (1524)

with which he was entering the lists against Luther. Probably in

1524 Holbein painted Erasmus again, in the best portrait of all, which

hangs in the Louvre; seeing that profound and chastened face one

thinks of Nisard's perceptive comment- that Erasmus was one of those

dont la gloire a ete de comprendre beaucoup et d'affirmer peu -

"whose glory it has been to understand much and to affirm

little." `063628

About 1523 Holbein painted himself, now twenty-six, and seemingly

prosperous; but the cold glance suggests some fighting resentment of

life's buffetings. Tradition discredits him with a moderate

addiction to drink and women, and represents him as unhappy with his

wife. Apparently he shared some Lutheran views; his woodcuts of The

Dance of Death (c. 1525) satirized the clergy- but even the clergy

did that in those days. The series showed Death dogging the steps of

every man, woman, or class- Adam, Eve, the Emperor, a noble, a

physician, a monk, a priest, a pope, a millionaire, an astrologer, a

duchess, a jester, a gambler, a thief- all en route to the Last

Judgment; it is as powerful a work as any of Durer's in this medium.

Aside from this masterpiece of drawing, and the Meyer Madonna,

Holbein is without visible piety. Perhaps he imbibed some skepticism

from Erasmus and the Basel humanists. `063629 He was more interested

in anatomy than in religion.

The Reformation, though he presumably favored it, ruined his

market in Basel. No more religious pictures were asked of him.

Payments on the paintings for the council hall were suspended. Rich

men, frightened by the Peasants' War, retreated into privacy and

parsimony, and thought the time unpropitious for portraits. "Here

the arts are freezing," wrote Erasmus from Basel in 1526. `063630 He

gave Holbein letters of introduction to friends in Antwerp and London,

and Holbein, leaving his family at home, sought fortune in the

north. He visited Quentin Massys, and doubtless they exchanged notes

about Erasmus. From Antwerp he crossed to England. Erasmus' letter

assured him a cordial welcome from Thomas More, who gave him a place

in his Chelsea home; and there he painted (1526) the portrait of

More that is now in the Frick Gallery in New York. To the hindsight of

the historian the tense and half-somber eyes foreshadow the devotion

and tenacity of the martyr; to the insight of an artist the wonder

will be in the fur and folds of the sleeve. In 1527 Holbein

painted

Thomas More and His Family - the oldest known group picture in

transalpine secular art.

Late in 1528 Holbein, having made some pounds and shillings,

returned to Basel, gave Erasmus a copy of More and His Family, and

rejoined his wife. Now he painted one of his greatest, most honest

pictures, showing his own family with a realism unsparing to

himself. Each of the three faces is sad: the girl resigned, almost

hopeless; the boy gazing up plaintively at his mother; she looking

upon them with grief and affection profoundly mirrored in her eyes-

the grief of a wife who has lost the love of her husband, the

affection of a mother whose children are her only tie to life. Three

years after painting this masterly self-indictment, Holbein left his

family again.

During this stay in Basel he painted another portrait of Froben, and

made six more of Erasmus, not as searchingly profound as those of

1523-24. The town council renewed his commission to fresco its

chambers, but, yielding to the triumphant iconoclasts, it condemned

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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