Martin Luther (1483-1546), one of the most important figures in the history of the Christian Church in Europe, was a close contemporary and good friend of the German artist, Lucas Cranach, who enjoys a reputation almost as exalted as Albrecht Durer among his contemporaries in the central Europa of the early sixteenth century.
Born in Kronach, a town in Upper Franconia, Cranach, who was named after his birthplace, was, like his fellow German Albrecht Durer, a painter and printmaker who embraced a wide range of subject matter. His output comprises religious and historical subjects as well as allegorical or symbolical themes and is perhaps best known for his many renderings – unusual in northern Europe at that date – of the female nude: Venus or Eve, or the blissful denizens of the Golden Age. Attractive as they are, his nudes, however, seem formulaic, as though he had never had the opportunity to look at the female body in actuality. But his portraits could hardly be more convincing as studies from the life. Like Durer, he was a consummate creator of likenesses, and was responsible for some of the most powerful images of the great men of the German Renaissance.
He painted Luther very many times, from his youth to his death, leaving a richly detailed record of the man as observed by a close acquaintance. We are fortunate to possess, in the city collection at Bristol, one of the finest of these portraits, a highly finished yet essentially informal study of a thoughtful man presented just as he must have been seen by an acquaintance who was also a superb draughtsman and acute observer of his fellow-men.
All the information we are given is in the beautifully modelled face with its serious expression; there is no distraction either in the plain black clothes he wears or in the uninterrupted green of the background – a colour frequently used in portraits of this period (it is often found in the backgrounds of portraits by Cranach’s other great contemporary Hans Holbein).
Luther became an Augustinian monk and established himself as a profound scholar increasingly disturbed by what he saw as the abuses of the Church. In 1517, at the age of 34 he published his strongly-held views by nailing them, according to a famous story, on the door of the church in his native town of Wittenburg. His arguments were so powerful – they included an attack on the Church’s exploitation of popular superstition by the sale of “indulgences”, or periods of exemption from punishment in Purgatory – that the whole of the European Reformation sprang from that one act of defiance.
It is somewhat thrilling to know that we can witness the development from youth to old age of this remarkable historical figure as though he were an intimate acquaintance.
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