Arts: Paintings: Cardinal Borghese's collection, with focus on elder Lucas Cranach 91472-1553]

 

new york review of books [jan15,2k11]
The Worldly Temptations of Lucas Cranach

Ingrid D. Rowland

The phrase “Renaissance man” tends to conjure up images of Italians in tights, like Leonardo da Vinci, or that tireless fifteenth-century self-promoter Leon Battista Alberti. Yet the real early modern masters of a thousand arts seem to have come from parts farther north. Peter Paul Rubens was famously both a student of philosophy and a diplomat as well as painter, but no artist may have diversified his talents as widely as the elder Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), mayor of Wittenberg, tavern keeper, and, more than incidentally, court painter for more than half a century to the Electors of Saxony. Cranach is best known now, as he was in his own day, for his paintings of women—impossibly long-legged coquettes with catlike eyes and purring expressions, one of whom, a Venus clad in nothing but a red velvet hat and a gossamer veil, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition being staged this winter within the permanent collection of Rome’s Borghese Gallery.\

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