Background
Lucas Cranach the Elder was born at Kronach in upper Franconia, probably in 1472. His exact date of birth is unknown.
Lucas Cranach the Elder was born at Kronach in upper Franconia, probably in 1472. His exact date of birth is unknown.
Lucas’s teacher was his father, the painter Hans Müller, with whom he worked from 1495 to 1498.
From 1495 to 1498 undertook work at Kronach for Coburg and Gotha. There is evidence that Cranach resided in Vienna between about 1500 and 1504.
Cranach's earliest known works belong to the period of his Vienna residence and are strongly expressive in style, with figures and landscape dramatically united in movement; an interest in picturesque landscape manifests itself, anticipating tendencies peculiar to the so called Danube school. Characteristic examples are St. Jerome in Penitence (1502), the half-length portraits of Dr. Johannes Cuspinian and his wife Anna (ca. 1502 - 1503), and the Crucifixion in Munich (1503). In the composition of the Crucifixion Cranach broke sharply with iconographic tradition and employed bold foreshortening and other spatial devices that reflect a knowledge of the art of Michael Pacher and, through it, of Andrea Mantegna. In Cranach's first signed painting, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1504), the spirit is idyllic and the actions of the figures are lively.
Cranach's work became less emotional after he moved to Wittenberg in 1505, although the change was slower in the woodcuts than in the paintings. His woodcuts were technically inspired by Albrecht Dürer's but less finely cut and less clearly organized. In Cranach's woodcuts a dramatic emphasis prevailed, and a preference for tone led, by 1509, to the use of the chiaroscuro technique, as in the St. Christopher of 1506, reused or recut and printed with a color block in 1509. The change in style in the paintings may be seen in the Martyrdom of St. Catherine in Dresden (1506), in which the emphatic rendering of the garment patterns, the falling tongues of fire, and the crowding of the figures result in a loss of compositional unity and spatial clarity; and in the Holy Kinship Altarpiece (1509), painted soon after Cranach's trip to the Netherlands, in which Flemish influence accounts for the general disposition and costumes of the figures. Thereafter Cranach's painting was increasingly distinguished by minimal modeling, stress on linear detail, clean contours, and, in the portraits and most pictures of one or two figures, unmodeled backgrounds. This may be observed in works of such diverse subject matter as the Madonna and Child in Breslau (ca. 1510), the model for many variants to issue from his workshop; Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg as St. Jerome in His Study (1525), based on Dürer's engraving St. Jerome in His Study; the Judgment of Paris (1530) and Venus (1532), in which the subjects are classical but the interpretation is pervaded by a naive charm due in large part to Cranach's curvaceous, gently erotic female nudes; the full-length portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and his wife Catherine (1514); the Fountain of Youth (1546); and Reformation pictures like the Fall and Salvation (1529) and Christ Blessing the Little Children (1538). Cranach also painted hunting scenes for the lodges of his princely patrons. Cranach's drawings include eight pages of marginal illustrations for the Prayer Book of Maximilian (1515) and magnificent animal and portrait studies, like the head of Martin Luther's father (ca. 1527). His best-known engraving is the Penance of St. John Chrysostom (1509).
In 1504 he married to Barbara Brengbier of Gotha; they had three daughters and two sons, Hans (died 1537) and Lucas the Younger (1515 - 1586), both of whom were painters.