Introduction by Larry Silver

Lucas Cranach and the Woodcuts

by Larry Silver

When called upon to discuss two of the most famous German artists of the early sixteenth century, in his Elements of Rhetoric (1531) Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s associate, compared Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) to his contemporary Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) in the following terms regarding their graphic arts:

“Dürer painted and engraved everything in the grand manner, with differentiation in light and shade by more or less close hatching. Lucas Cranach’s pictures are spare, for all that they are attractive.”¹

Both the context and the observation are significant. For the Passional Christi and Antichristi visual rhetoric was crucial, and the simpler outline style of woodcut by Cranach was far better suited to the pictorial clarity and effective communication than Dürer’s intricate graphic syntax, founded on the refined medium of engraving.

But Luther had other compelling reasons to turn to Lucas Cranach for this important task of illustration, which marked a rhetorical turning-point in his own publications--the first pamphlet to include significant imagery. Moreover, the Passional appeared at Luther’s own critical juncture of 1521, in the immediate wake of his interdict at Worms and on the heels of his bridge-burning manifestos of 1520, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man.

Lucas Cranach, the son of a painter in Franconia, basically followed his father’s profession throughout his long career.² He made a formative trip to Vienna in 1501-04, which resulted in his first dated pictures as well as several portraits. But his first association with Wittenberg followed soon after in 1505, when he was called by Frederick the Wise, Luther’s patron and Elector of Saxony, to serve as court artist. In 1508 he was granted a coat of arms with a winged, crowned serpent, used as a signature on both paintings and prints thereafter. Many of his early woodcut prints for the Elector bear the ducal coats of arms, suggesting that they received approval from his patron or were even sometimes direct commissions, though they also indicate the pride of the artist in his court status. Cranach also experimented with the techniques of woodcut, fashioning some of the earliest colored prints as well as an early example of an expanded field in the form of a two-sheet woodcut.³ And he had already anticipated the subject and imagery of the Passional illustrations a decade earlier with his Passion cycle, published as a series of fourteen sheets in Wittenberg, in 1509.

Among other tasks, Cranach decorated ducal residences and became a favorite portraitist for noble families of the region. He also he built up a large local workshop that allowed him to produce prodigious numbers of paintings but also woodcut prints, including both religious works (notably an illustrated guide to Frederick’s renowned relics collection) and court imagery, particularly tournaments and hunts. His productivity allowed him to become wealthy, the owner of several houses and an apothecary; he served on the city council of Wittenberg from 1519 to 1545, and was even elected burgomaster three times.

As both a printmaker and a painter, Cranach and his workshop produced numerous portraits of Luther (later paired in pendant portraits with his wife Katharina von Bora), Melanchthon, as well as Frederick the Wise and his brother, John the Constant.

But Cranach and Luther had a more personal relationship. Cranach established a publishing firm in 1523 that published several Reformation pamphlets during its brief existence. Both men stood godfather to the other’s children. And of course, Cranach became one of the principal formulators of both painted and printed images for the Lutheran creed. His most notable Lutheran visual formula-came later in the same decade: the contrasting of Law versus Grace (or Law and the Gospel;1529), in both painted and printed versions, which uses the same antithetical contrasts as the Passional.⁴

Woodcut is a basic and collaborative graphic medium, which consists of carving a wooden block around a drawn design so that the lines of the design remain as ridges to print when inked, much like a modern rubber stamp. The final carved block resembles the raised letters of movable type used to print the lines of a book, and both can be printed from the same press. Moreover, carving the wood-block requires specialized talents and tools, especially to realize the ridges of fine lines of the design, so woodcut artists almost inevitably collaborated with a carver (German: Formschneider, or form-cutter; anonymous in the case of Cranach) to produce their prints. Because of that collaboration in production, facilitated through the organization of his own workshop, Cranach could successfully translate his designs for woodcuts into print illustrations in the series that accompanied the selected texts of the Passional. Moreover, that same strong linear element, so basic to woodcuts, made those Passional images both clear and effective on the page--“spare” or simple in the words of Melanchthon--when paired together with the lines of text. Thus besides personal connections in Wittenberg, Cranach’s earlier demonstrated mastery of the woodcut illustration medium linked him to Luther as an ideal contributor to the success of the Passional Christi and Antichristi.

Cranach’s first major Reform print (1519) was far less successful visually, overwhelming its pictorial elements with densely packed German texts while providing a more complex, allegorical message in the process. It was based on a program not by Luther, but by his Wittenberg colleague and eventual rival, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, who participated in a disputation in the city with Catholic advocate Johannes Eck. In Luther’s absence in 1522, Karlstadt pushed the Reform theology further still, emphasizing destruction of images altogether, a move stopped by Luther on his return in March of that year. But in 1519 Cranach’s first affiliation with the new movement involved composing an allegory of two opposing wagons, advancing in opposite directions, one above the other.⁵ The upper wagon, carrying a pious layman, advances leftward in eight segments toward a standing Christ with the cross. Astride two of its horses in the team sit two guiding saints: Augustine in his bishop’s miter and Paul with a halo. Its message, based on Augustine as interpreted by Luther, emphasizes submission to God’s will. In contrast, the lower wagon heads to the right toward the gaping mouth of hell, already filled with naked sinners and devils. That cart represents the scholastic theology of the Catholic Church and is guided by a cleric, seated next to a devil, and asserting his own will (eigner wil). The team of horses here is accompanied by “good works.” This first significant Reform effort by Cranach marks his local collaboration in Wittenberg with a program devised by a leading theologian; it uses the same kind of visual antithesis, here between top and bottom, which would fully shape his 1521 Passional woodcuts.

Cranach’s increasing intimacy with Luther soon led him to generate one of the other major pictorial types of the Reformation: portraits celebrating the leaders of the new faith. Cranach would continue to produce Luther portraits in bust length and full length for the rest of his career, in both woodcut prints as well as small panel paintings, but his first burst of imagery came at precisely the time of the Passional, 1520-21.⁶ In most of his printed images, he insists on the authenticity of the likeness, based on careful study from life, but his Luther images, both engravings and woodcuts, also use Latin inscriptions to defer to the superior written word over the portrait’s “true likeness” of the Reformer: “Luther gave form to the eternal likeness of his spirit; Lucas portrayed his mortal features.”⁷ Yet our pictorial image of Luther’s features remain the artworks by his friend Lucas Cranach.

Moreover, shortly after they worked together to compose the Passional, Cranach had privileged access to Luther during his stay at the Wartburg (1521-22), when he not only busily translated the New Testament into German but also grew a beard and moved around in disguise for self-preservation after his condemnation at Worms. As a German knight, “Junker Jörg,” rather than in the monk’s robes or doctor’s cap of his previous likenesses, Luther posed for both a painting and a woodcut portrait (1522) by Cranach, before he finally returned to Wittenberg and confronted Karlstadt.⁸ Cranach’s images provide the essential documentation of this significant moment in Luther’s biography, all the more poignant for its momentous connections to both the Passional and Cranach’s own emerging illustrations to Luther’s new German Bible.

Luther began his translation of the New Testament at the Wartburg and rapidly completed it, with editing assistance by Melanchthon, back in Wittenberg in 1522. His goal was to have the printed work ready in time for the Frankfurt book fair in September, so the initial print run has become known as the “September Testament.”⁹ Cranach not only designed illustrations, largely based on the prior woodcuts by Dürer for his Apocalypse (1498), but he also worked in the physical production of the volumes with Christian Döring on the presses of Melchior Lotter. A revised edition swiftly appeared as the “December Testament,” the first of many reprints of this cornerstone of the German language. Cranach’s twenty-one woodcut illustrations, using the same spare simplicity admired by Melanchthon, featured aggressive additions made to his Dürer model: a distinctly anti-papal iconography, particularly in those woodcuts that show the papal triple tiara, variously worn by the dragon in the temple (Rev. 11) and the beast (Rev. 16), as well as the Whore of Babylon (Rev. 17); that inflammatory imagery, however, was edited out in the December reprint at the request of Duke George of Saxony.

Cranach’s ultimate distillation of both his woodcut technique and the emerging Lutheran message reappeared at the end of the decade of the twenties in the theological formula known as Law and Grace, or Law and the Gospel.¹⁰ This imagery derives from Luther’s attempt to instruct the faithful through devotional images and paintings (andechtig bilder und gemelde). As in the Passional as well as in the September Testament woodcuts, the simple outline figures convey a clear message; here, too, as in both the Karlstadt Wagon allegory and the Passional, the structure operates through antithesis, reading like the Passional from left to right.

Law and Grace begins on the left, where a poor, naked sinner is driven into the flames of Hell by the joint forces of Death and the Devil, as Moses and other Old Testament prophets look on. Behind him Adam and Eve commit their Original Sin, leading to the Last Judgment in the sky above, which condemns all such sinful mortals to everlasting punishment. The image is separated down the middle by a tree, whose leaves are dead on the side of Law but abundant on the side of Grace. Then, the right side unfolds as the only solution, through God’s mercy, to that otherwise inexorable divine judgment. Here, the sinner, guided by John the Baptist, looks up at the cross; from the side wound of Jesus emerges healing blood, descending to the prayerful human while accented by the dove of the Holy Spirit and the sacrificial Lamb of God at the foot of the cross. In the lower right corner, Christ rises from his cave-like tomb, trampling in conquest upon the recumbent figures of Death and the Devil with a banner of victory.. Thus Old Testament commandments are redeemed through the sacrifice of the cross and the triumph of the Resurrection.

Law and Grace sheds a revealing retrospective light on the Passional Christi and Antichristi. It underscores the same left-right contrast of antithesis, though in the earlier work the historical events of Christ’s life that begin the pairings on the left page give way to the images of papal abuses and decadence, leading up to the culminating image of the pope in Hell on the right.¹¹ The decade of the twenties refined Cranach’s fine outline style and clarity of figures in his woodcuts, from the Passional itself through the September Testament to Law and Grace.

One aspect of the Passional that has not yet been noted is its localization in the German present. Rather than situate the scenes from the New Testament in a distant or exotic foreign setting, those woodcuts deliberately insert evergreen trees and distant mountaintop castles, characteristic of the Danube-style landscapes first produced by the young Cranach but also indirectly alluding to the court setting of Saxony, many of whose castles the artist placed in the backgrounds of his paintings.¹² The net effect of these choices is to make the biblical scenes both Germanic and familiar, clear and simple to understand, like the choice of the German language vernacular for the biblical texts, in contrast to the foreign excesses (and even the obscure and complex papal decretals and canon law, used ironically to undermine papal claims).

The specific visual contrasts will be examined individually in the images that follow, and the emerging theology of the pope as Antichrist in the Passional will be elucidated in accompanying essays. But this investigation has revealed what a crucial intervention--visual, theological, and biographical--was forged for both parties in this collaboration of 1521 between the artist Lucas Cranach and his friend and patron in Wittenberg, the emerging Martin Luther.