Architecture Under the Reformation
German church architecture darkened in the age of the Reformation. No new church rose any longer to honor art or religion. Many churches were left unfinished, and many others were pulled down entirely so that the princes' castles could be built from their stones. Protestant churches aimed purely at simplicity and plainness, while Catholic churches, as if in protest, ran to excess in every kind of ornament, and it was at this time that the Renaissance itself turned toward the baroque. As dukes replaced bishops, the architecture of civic buildings and palaces took the place of building cathedrals, and the state brought religious organization within its domain. Some of the civic buildings that survived from that time and were of value were lost in the Second World War: the Altstadt hall in Brunswick, the Butchers' Guild House in Hildesheim, and the Rathaus (council hall) at Nimwegen. The most ambitious architecture of that age and the next took the form of enormous castles in the domains of local princes, such as the castle of Dresden, which cost the people of that state 100,000 florins; the palace of Duke Christopher at Stuttgart, so extravagant in furniture, chandeliers and ornament that the city magistrates warned the duke that the luxury and splendor of his court contrasted scandalously with the poverty of his people; and the vast castle of Heidelberg, begun in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the Renaissance manner in 1556-1563, partly damaged in the Second World War.
Crafts and Sculpture
The industrial arts preserved their perfection in the service of princes, nobles, merchants and bankers. Cabinetmakers, carpenters, ivory-carvers, engravers, miniature painters, weavers, blacksmiths, potters, goldsmiths, armorers and jewelers had all inherited the skills and techniques of the Middle Ages, though their general tendency was now to sacrifice taste and artistic form to complexity and abundance of ornament. Many painters drew designs for woodcuts, taking as much care as in portraits of kings; woodcut makers such as Hans Lutzelburger of Basel practiced their craft with the same faith and love as a great master like Durer. The goldsmiths of Nuremberg, Munich and Vienna were the best of their rivals; Wenzel Jamnitzer could challenge the master Cellini. About 1547 German craftsmen made painting on glass with enamel colors common, so that vessels and windows were decorated with designs and pictures, crude but varied, and wealthy burghers could preserve their portraits fused onto the glass of their house windows.
German sculptors kept their old preference for statues and reliefs in metal. The sons of Peter Vischer followed his profession: Peter the Younger cast a bronze plaque in relief of Orpheus and Eurydice; Hans produced the beautiful design of the Apollo Fountain for the courtyard of the Nuremberg town hall; Paul, it is said, carved the beautiful Nuremberg Madonna in wood. Peter Flotner of Nuremberg cast fine reliefs of Envy, Justice, Saturn and the dancing Muse. One of the most interesting treasures of the Louvre is the bust of Otto Heinrich, Count Palatine, by Joachim Deschler; it is nearly seventeen centimeters high, and its stout body is about as thick, with a face formed by years of good appetite. It is a striking specimen of German humor at its fullest.
The Second Rank of Painters
Yet the glory of German art still rested on its painting. Holbein the Younger stood equal to Durer in mastery; Lucas Cranach came immediately after them; and Baldung Grien, Altdorfer and Amberger formed a respectable group of second-rank painters. Hans Baldung won his fame with the altarpiece of the church at Freiburg im Breisgau; but a more charming work is his Madonna with the Parrot, which shows a plump, rosy Teutonic woman with golden hair, a parrot pecking at her cheeks. Christoph Amberger painted several delicate, tasteful portraits, among them the Portrait of Charles V in the museum at Lille (as the book places it), which shows well his cordiality, wit and hidden bigotry, and the Portrait of a Man at the Art Institute of Chicago, in which a noble and kindly face is drawn with a firm, exact hand. Albrecht Altdorfer, with the splendid landscapes he made, holds a lofty place among these painters; in St. George, the knight and the dragon are almost hidden among the crowd of trees that fill the canvas; even the Battle of Arbela loses its throng of fighters amid an abundance of towers and ramparts and of mountains, waters, clouds and sun. These two works by Altdorfer, with another called Rest on the Flight into Egypt, are counted among the first true landscape pictures in modern painting.
Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder took his name from his birthplace, Kronach, a town in Upper Franconia. Almost nothing is known of his life except that at thirty-two he entered the service of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, as court painter at Wittenberg (1504). Cranach kept his place at the Saxon court, or sometimes at Weimar, for nearly fifty years. He met Luther, liked him, painted his face many times, and illustrated some of his writings with caricatures of popes; yet he also painted portraits of Catholic notables, such as the Duke of Alba and Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz. He was shrewd in trade and business, turned his workshop into a factory for portraits and religious pictures, set aside a corner of it for selling books and medicine, became mayor of Wittenberg (the book says in 1565, which cannot be right since he died in 1553), and at last died with a full purse and many years behind him.
Italian artistic influence had now reached Wittenberg. It shows in the heavenly grace of Cranach's religious pictures, and still more in his mythological pictures, especially his nudes. Now in Germany as in Italy, non-religious gods and heroes were rivals of Mary, Christ and the saints; but German humor made sport of the dead gods of myth, and by this breathed a spirit of gaiety into the tradition of painting. In Cranach's Judgment of Paris, for example, Paris, a hero of the Trojan war, is asleep while the three embodiments of beauty, shivering with cold, wait for him to wake and judge their loveliness. In Venus and Cupid the goddess of love is shown in complete nudity as usual, except that she also wears a large hat, as if Cranach meant to hint that love always arises from familiarity, so that if some unfamiliar side element (the hat) is added, it lessens the effect. But his Venus was popular and much in demand; with the help of his assistants Cranach showed the goddess in a dozen different forms, which now light the museums of Frankfurt, Leningrad, the Borghese Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum. The Venus at Frankfurt hides the beauties of her body behind a dozen filaments of cobweb-like transparent cloth; and in the Lucretia at the Berlin museum the same bare beauty appears again. The woman who was the model of the Venuses also inspired Cranach's Nymph of the Spring (New York), where she lies on a couch of green leaves beside a pool. In another Cranach in the museum at Geneva the woman has become Judith, but is no longer nude. Finally we see the same woman, nude again, as Eve in Paradise (Vienna), Adam and Eve (Dresden) and Eve and the Serpent (Chicago). Almost all these nudes have a quality that keeps them far from anything erotic. Cranach mixed a kind of devilish humor with the warmth of his colors and the Italianate delicacy of his lines; and moreover, with unpatriotic frankness, he drew the German woman slender and thin. It was a bold act, this belittling of the "German lady"!
Cranach's Portraits
The portraits that came from Cranach's brush and his assistants' are more remarkable than his monotonous nudes, and indeed some are the equal of Holbein's. The portrait of Anna Cuspinian is a specimen of realistic painting whose dryness and frankness of expression is seasoned by delicate work, a rich gown and a puffed cap. Her husband, Johannes Cuspinian, also sat for Cranach to produce a still finer likeness. In the portrait of Johannes Cuspinian all the ideals of a young humanist are reflected in thoughtful eyes, confirmed by the symbol of a book he presses eagerly in his hand. Perhaps a hundred persons of rank had their portraits recorded in oil or chalk in this famous studio, yet none deserved lasting fame like the portrait of the Prince of Saxony (Washington); this child's portrait is an emblem of innocence, gentleness and golden curls.
At the other end of life Cranach made the portrait of Johannes Schoner, which brings before the viewer the ugly marks of age mixed with artistic distinction. In Cranach's works there are also beautiful, well-bred animals, and especially his stags look so lifelike that, as one of his friends said, "the dogs bark at the sight of them." Had Cranach not succeeded so well at the start, he might have turned out a greater artist. The number of his customers and patrons divided and scattered his genius, so that he no longer had time to put all his artistic gift into one path. When he reached eighty-one he was tired and stopped working. His drawing, which had once equaled Durer's strength, grew careless, the fine details fell from his brush, and faces, nudes and trees, all alike, were repeated so often under his hand that they took on a lifeless air. In the end we must agree with the judgment the aged Durer made of the new Cranach: Lucas could describe outward signs, not the soul.
In 1550, at seventy-eight, he made his self-portrait, with a massive, square head, white dignified beard, broad nose and eyes full of character and pride, looking more like a councilor or a stout merchant than a painter and woodcut-maker. Three years later he gave his body to the earth. He left three sons, all painters: Johann Lucas, Hans, and Lucas the Younger, whose famous picture Sleeping Hercules, showing the giant hero in perfect unconcern at the javelins the dwarfs thrust at his body without piercing his skin, carried a thought-provoking theme from Rabelais to Swift. Perhaps Cranach the Younger too bore with the same Herculean unconcern the jibes of rivals who charged him with bourgeois-mindedness and with haste at the expense of conscientiousness; and now he rests in peace under a gravestone that bears the ambiguous praise "the swiftest painter."
The End of a Golden Age
With his death the brilliant age of German painting ended. The chief cause of this decline was in all likelihood the intensity of religious controversy, not the Protestant ban on making images of saints. Probably after 1520 the general corruption of manners gave German painting a base and coarse character, so that nude painting won more favor than any other kind, and even in painting Biblical tales they turned to themes such as Susanna and the Elders, Potiphar's wife tempting Joseph, or Bathsheba at her bath. For two centuries after Cranach's death German art declined and was hidden behind the troubled waves of religion and war.