There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The fifteenth century had seen a great flowering of the visual arts all over Europe, and in Luther’s Germany painters provided an astonishing flow of emotionally charged ultra-Catholic art, devotional or liturgical images for veneration or meditation in church and home.
But with the appearance of Luther, the age of the cult image in much of north-eastern Europe came to an end. Art, it seemed, was about to be eliminated by the word of God. The Kingdom of Christ, Luther declared, ‘is a hearing kingdom, not a seeing kingdom: for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears do this.’1 He was inclined to think at first that religion would be better off with no images at all. Great painters, Dürer among them, welcomed the new teaching as a God-given liberation of the spirit, but they trembled for their livelihood. As the Strasbourg painter Heinrich Vogtherr observed, throughout Germany the gospel had brought the ‘diminution and arrest of all subtle and liberal arts’, so that ‘in a few years, there will scarcely be found anyone working as painter or sculptor.’2 In 1522, one of Luther’s closest collaborators, the priest Andreas Karlstadt, supervised the removal and destruction of all the images in the churches of Wittenberg, with the connivance of the city authorities – the first significant officially sanctioned iconoclasm of the Reformation era. As the new teaching spread outside Germany – to Switzerland, the Low Countries, eventually to England and Scotland – the public destruction of images would become a standard rite of purification, the concrete symbol of the overthrow of the Roman antichrist and the establishment of a gospel worship in spirit and in truth.
But not in Luther’s Germany: alarmed by the extremism of the iconoclasts, Luther shifted from indifference to pictures, to positive approval of them. The human soul, he taught, was itself an image-making mechanism. When he heard of the Passion of Christ, he declared, ‘it is impossible for me not to make images of this within my heart ... when I hear the word Christ, there delineates itself in my heart the picture of a man who hangs on the cross.’ And if every hearer of the gospel has the image of Christ in his heart, ‘why then should it be sinful to have it before my eyes?’3 Images might therefore be usefully retained in church, so long as it was clear that they were not sacred in themselves, but served as mere reminders or teachers of gospel truths. To a papist, Luther thought, the crucifix was indeed an idol, something to be venerated and bowed down to. To the good Lutheran, by contrast, the same image was a message from heaven, a signpost directing the believer’s gaze beyond the sign to the invisible signified.
As it happened, Wittenberg had in Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach not only an ardently committed Protestant, but one of the most successful painters of his generation. Cranach and his highly commercialized factory-studio poured out images which decisively shaped the official visual propaganda for the new movement, creating not only dozens of bible illustrations or woodcuts idealizing Luther and lampooning the old religion, but also a series of elaborate painted altarpieces designed to adorn and explain the worship of the flagship churches of the new movement.4
Since the Romantic era, we have lived with the cliché that any artist worth his salt must be an unruly individualist, in rebellion against the moral and aesthetic constraints of a philistine world – a William Blake, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Francis Bacon. In that perspective, the notion of the painter as tradesman-entrepreneur, successful, respectable, organizing his output on production-line principles and adapting both subject matter and style to the taste of the highest bidder, seems all wrong. But Lucas Cranach the elder, the great mythopoeic painter of the German Reformation, was just such a shopkeeping genius.
Cranach more or less singlehandedly invented the visual vocabulary for Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. Cranach charted his friend’s evolution from wild-eyed monk to magisterial reformer in a stream of portrait prints and panel paintings. His mass-produced images made Luther’s the most familiar face in sixteenth-century Europe, and became the definitive icons of the new religion.5 And yet, at the height of his activity as Luther’s publicist, he was working equally hard on lucrative commissions from the most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic in Germany: Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, the very man whose blatant sale of indulgences had driven Luther to protest in the first place. Friendship, art and ideological purity were all very well, but for Cranach, business was business.
Nothing is known about his early life, though his background is suggested by his family name: Mahler, ‘painter’. He was born in Kronach, in Saxony, and adopted the name of his home town to distinguish himself from other jobbing craftsmen. His early style would in any case have marked him out as special. When he first surfaces around 1500 in Vienna, Cranach was already a mature artist in his late twenties, whose work belonged to the same disturbing, imaginative world as Grünewald’s Eisenheim altarpiece. Tormented figures drawn with rapid, agitated strokes inhabit landscapes whose vivid natural features mimic the emotions of the human characters. Crucified bodies seem to emerge out of the wood of the crosses on which they writhe. Cranach’s intense colouring and detailed landscape backgrounds would inspire a new school of painters in the Danube region, but he moved away from this early work. While at Vienna, he also established himself as a portraitist, with a series of luminous paintings of distinguished Viennese academics and their wives. His sitters pose in idyllic landscapes filled with astrological symbolism, showing that the artist was absorbing the fashionable humanist learning then making its mark in the German universities.6
In 1505, however, Cranach left the imperial capital to become court painter to the elector of Saxony, Prince Frederick the Wise. After Vienna, Frederick’s capital at Wittenberg must have seemed a provincial backwater, its 2,000 citizens squeezed into 400 houses within the city walls. But Wittenberg was on the up. A few years earlier, Frederick had founded a new university there and begun recruiting distinguished academic staff; he now recruited this talented young metropolitan painter to proclaim the wealth and sophistication of the Saxon court.
The work of a court painter was varied, but not always glamorous. Cranach and, soon, an extensive workshop of studio assistants were kept busy producing devotional paintings for the homes of the nobility, altarpieces and images of the saints for local parish churches, and portraits of the electoral family and principal courtiers, many of them designed as gifts for Frederick’s friends and allies. Cranach rapidly evolved stereotyped likenesses of the elector and his family, which could be endlessly replicated by his assistants. But portraiture also produced some of his best work, especially his exquisitely sensitive portraits of the royal children, in which he captured with sympathy and affection their patent unease under the weight of their stiff court robes, and their nervous uncertainty about where to put their hands.
His daily bread, though, was a kind of work we associate with interior decorators rather than creative artists: heraldic devices for tournaments and hunts, table ornaments for banquets, shields and logos for the ducal coaches, house signs and banners. Frederick was passionate about jousting and hunting. To publicize these prestigious court events, Cranach produced a series of intricate woodcuts depicting the incidents of the hunt, or the jumble of lances, armour and horses at jousts. Frederick also owned one of Europe’s most spectacular collections of relics: holy skulls, bones and teeth in their hundreds, a hair from the beard of Christ, threads from Our Lady’s veil, a twig from the burning bush. Displayed in the castle church in eight aisles, the 5,000 relics and their precious containers were a major tourist draw. In 1509, Cranach provided 108 woodcuts for a lavishly illustrated printed catalogue, designed to advertise the indulgences granted for venerating the relics, and to be sold as a pilgrim souvenir.
His sketchbooks were filled with all he saw around him at court: a brace of pheasants in the castle larder, racing herds of deer, the head of a stag shot through the eye with an arrow, or the rugged face of an elderly peasant, maybe a gamekeeper or beater, caught in a rapid watercolour sketch and easily the most memorable of all his portraits. But he also responded to widening acquaintance with art and artists. There were wary personal encounters at Nuremberg with Dürer, whose work he admired, envied, imitated and occasionally parodied. A diplomatic mission to the Netherlands in 1509 triggered a series of paintings heavily influenced by Flemish models, including a deeply moving pietà and a candlelit nativity. A series of Italianate panels of the Madonna and Child from the mid-1510s onwards strongly recalls Perugino and Francesco Francia, and suggests that Cranach may have ventured south of the Alps at least once.
To these influences were added the special demands on a successful court painter – perhaps, most of all, the need to evolve a style that allowed him to delegate the more mechanical side of his commissions. The agitated individuality of his Viennese period gave way to a sweeter, blander manner. He established a successful workshop in the town, where mass-production techniques prevailed. His pictures were now routinely painted on birch-wood panels cut to standard sizes by a team of carpenters, often to the precise dimensions of the paper sheets and cover boards used in the bookbinding and printing business he was also running. He accumulated pattern drawings of heads, hands, limbs, as well as incidental birds and beasts, for use in different contexts. It became difficult to distinguish the hand of the master from that of his assistants. Cranach’s own skills were undiminished, but the resulting stylistic smoothing-out can be gauged from two versions of the same subject, ten years apart. In an altarpiece depicting the martyrdom of Saint Catherine, painted in 1505 and now in Budapest, fire and brimstone cascade down from the stormy heavens, the torturer’s toothed wheel explodes spectacularly, sending horses and riders tumbling in confusion (the falling figures were lifted from a print by Dürer), while in the foreground an orc-like executioner with a grotesquely bulging codpiece wrenches at the saint’s décolletage and prepares to behead her. In the later version, painted for the ultra-Catholic bishop of Olmutz, all is decorous and calm. The exploding wheel and the brimstone appear scaled down in the remote distance, the horses and their riders stand calmly by, while a timid and elderly executioner, Private Godfrey in tights, apologetically moves aside the saint’s hair so as not to harm it.
Brimstone and exploding wheels, however, were nothing to the upheaval that Cranach’s friend Martin Luther was about to unleash on Christendom. The Augustinian monk had been sent by his order to Wittenberg in 1508 to teach scripture in the university. In 1517, fresh from an intense conversion experience after years of religious anxiety, Luther publicly challenged the scandal of the sale of indulgences. (The sale was being pushed in Germany to repay debts that Cardinal Albrecht had accumulated to buy his archbishopric; the Vatican’s cut went to rebuilding St Peter’s in Rome.) This protest against an obvious abuse soon spiralled into a wholesale rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church, and little Wittenberg leapt to prominence as the headquarters of the new movement.
From the outset, Cranach was crucial to its success. Through the early 1520s his printing house pumped out Luther’s pamphlets, with handsome decorated title pages designed by Cranach himself. It was Cranach’s press that issued Luther’s German New Testament in 1522. His portraits of the Wittenberg reformer, available as painted panels or more cheaply as paper prints, had an honoured place in thousands of homes. In 1521, he collaborated with Luther’s lieutenant, Philip Melancthon, to produce the most devastating pamphlet of the sixteenth century, The Passional of Christ and Antichrist. In this little booklet, twenty-six paired woodcuts with captions contrasted the evangelical Christ of Luther’s preaching with the abuses of the papacy: Christ and his followers humbly trudging the roads while the Pope is carried in a litter; Christ washing his disciples’ feet while the Pope’s foot is kissed by kings and emperors; Christ crowned with thorns while the Pope is crowned with the triple tiara. Cranach’s eloquent little woodcuts transformed Melancthon’s rather undistinguished prose into a polemical Exocet. Sold in vast numbers for a few pennies each, it burned into the consciousness of Protestant Europe the conviction that the Pope was indeed the antichrist.
Cranach went on to devise a new pictorial language for Protestantism, including an ingenious schematic illustration of the relationship between law and gospel. This was eagerly copied by other painters, including the younger Holbein, though it is hard to imagine anyone warming to its stiff and preachy didacticism. More attractive were a series of cartoon-like gospel paintings illustrating the free gift of salvation: Christ blessing the little children, Christ with the woman taken in adultery. For Luther’s own church in the 1540s, he created a great altarpiece depicting the reformer himself celebrating the communion, Last-Supper-style, flanked by side panels in which Melancthon baptizes a baby, and another colleague, Johannes Bugenhagen, hears confessions. In a smaller panel below, Luther preaches on the crucifix to his Wittenberg congregation, and the whole ensemble provided the new church with a powerful self-image. But perhaps the oddest of these pictorial renderings of Lutheran teaching was a series of small panels portraying the virtue of Charity as a naked and smiling young woman, surrounded by babies, with whom she suckles, cuddles or plays. The intended message here was that charity was a gift to the believer, as natural as motherhood and apple pie, not some duty-bound regime of good works. This theme embodied Cranach’s growing interest in the classical nude. Gospel teaching here shades into a charming human idyll whose religious ‘message’ is easily missed, perhaps because, in the end, it was superfluous.7
Despite superficial resemblances to their medieval predecessors, these Lutheran altarpieces share a number of striking new features. Relentlessly didactic rather than devotional, often heavily encrusted with explanatory text and biblical quotations, they ring the changes on a small repertoire of images officially approved by Luther as elucidating the meaning of Christ’s death: Adam and Eve and the tree of temptation, the brazen serpent which Moses raised in the wilderness and which prefigures the cross, the Last Supper, the lamb of God, the pointing finger of John the Baptist, the resurrected Christ trampling the dragon or skeleton of sin and death. Many of them also depict the new Church, in representations of Protestant celebration of the gospel sacraments of baptism and communion, and in portraits of its leaders or secular supporters. The Weimar altarpiece begun by Cranach in the 1550s but finished after his death by his son deploys almost all of this repertoire of official Lutheran imagery in an extended allegory of salvation, while in the foreground of the picture Luther and Cranach himself stand alongside John the Baptist under the cross. Luther points to a text in his Bible, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us of all sins,’ while a jet of Christ’s blood arcs spectacularly from his wounded side through the air to fall on Cranach’s head, vividly if unsubtly imaging a direct salvation unmediated by priest or ceremonial, and reiterating in pictorial code the literal sense of Luther’s text.
The dispiriting didacticism of this Lutheran art has often been commented on. Nineteenth-century Romantics blamed Luther for the death of art for art’s sake, and its replacement with mere propaganda. Hegel thought that the Reformation inaugurated a tragic but necessary shift towards interiority which had robbed art of its intrinsic holiness, a disjunction between the beautiful and the true. The material world, fetishized by medieval Christianity in the cult of relics, the Eucharist and holy images, was now disenchanted, and from that point onwards, however skilfully God, Christ or the saints might be portrayed by painters, ‘it is no help, we bow the knee no longer.’ Art was no longer sacred, immediate, an encounter with the ultimate: instead, it offered an alternative form of textuality, mere food for thought.
In a scintillating, learned and eloquent book the art historian Joseph Koerner explored this shift by an extended investigation of the method and meaning of Cranach’s Lutheran paintings. In particular, he focused on the monumental altarpiece Cranach painted for Luther’s own church, the Stadtkirche at Wittenberg, installed there in 1547 as a memorial to the first and greatest of the reformers. Koerner saw in this altarpiece the key to a new aesthetic, which preserved art by turning it into a form of pious self-effacement, enacting its own theological redundancy by presenting itself as a mere system of useful signs, not so much an alternative as a supplement to text, a vehicle for information and affirmation of the new gospel. Emptied of emotion and of claims to transcendence, Lutheran art represented the sacred not by confronting the visible Church with images of the invisible Church, a company of the saints caught up in a heavenly worship (as in Catholic altarpieces such as Duccio’s Maestà or van Eyck’s Ghent Adoration of the Lamb), but by depicting the quotidian activities of the visible Church itself. For the first time, altarpieces included pictures of routine church services. Lutheran communions were therefore celebrated in front of pictures of Lutheran communion services, in a self-referential and resolute refusal of transcendence. Interestingly, while medieval high altarpieces almost never feature the Last Supper (a subject normally reserved for relic altars or monastery refectories), the overwhelming majority of Lutheran altarpieces include a picture of the Last Supper, as historical warrant for the contemporary Church’s celebration. Even Lutheran representations of the crucifix strive to display the cross in the mundane setting and neutral space of the church building, not the sacred space of Calvary, thereby rendering it ‘an emotional blank’, not an object of worship but a sermon in paint. As Koerner, in a characteristically striking phrase, writes, ‘Christ dies in the dead air of a schoolroom.’8 This new ‘mortification of painting through text’ helped ensure Protestant art’s survival and continuing use as a didactic and propagandist tool, but at the price of the aesthetic collapse for which traditional art historians have berated it.
Koerner’s readings of Cranach’s art are unfailingly arresting and inventive, but perhaps because of rather than despite their brilliance, the reader sometimes wonders if he doesn’t over-read the evidence. What if the ‘emotional blankness’ of so much of Cranach’s religious painting springs not from a ‘new aesthetic’, but from imaginative exhaustion, or from the routinization and decline of quality inevitable given the use of assistants and of mass-production methods in his money-spinning studio? And can one then claim that an ideological hiatus divides Cranach’s pre- and post-Lutheran art, from Catholic expression to Protestant didacticism?
There is a wider issue here: it is perfectly true that early mid-sixteenth-century Lutherans, while retaining images, were wary of the danger of idolatry, a wariness that inform the sometimes leaden didacticism Koerner discerned in Lutheran art. But many overtly affective medieval devotional images survived in Lutheran churches, and by the late sixteenth century the conflict with Calvinism made the retention of older images and the creation of new a distinctive confessional ‘marker’ of militant Lutheranism. Lutheran altarpieces might incorporate late medieval devotional images, and newly commissioned Lutheran religious paintings and sculpture often deployed the same affective Baroque appeal to the heart of the onlooker as their Catholic counterparts. Lutheran clergy might comment on, and deplore, the renewed ‘thirst for images’ among their people, but the search for a more deeply internalized and affective piety led devotional writers like Jacob Arndt to plunder the mystical and devotional literature of the late Middle Ages. And the desire for a more ardent religion of the heart led Arndt to place a high value on the affective power of devotional art. In his 1597 treatise Ikonographia he wrote that ‘Just as a figurative speech ... paints an image in the heart through hearing, and forms it so that it remains in the mind, so looking at a beautiful image and painting forms in a person’s heart in a spiritual manner that which it signifies.’ Such sentiments ensured that the Lutheran art of the Baroque era would often be hard to distinguish from its Catholic counterparts.9
But in any case, whatever the theological difficulties, financial considerations ensured that for Cranach, the break between his Catholic and his Protestant painting was never absolute. Cranach was undoubtedly a convinced Protestant. He and Luther were close friends, and personal friendship, as well as conscientious conviction and a shrewd eye to the main chance, lay behind his work on behalf of the Reformation. When Luther took the dramatic and scandalous step of marrying a former nun in 1525, the timid Melancthon stayed away, but Cranach was Luther’s best man. He sold mass-produced sets of paired wedding portraits of the couple, a defiant proclamation of the reformer’s evangelical freedom from monkish vows. Painter and preacher were godfathers to each other’s children, and in 1527 Cranach painted tender portraits of Luther’s aged father and mother.10 The insight into character and obvious affection of these great pictures were another testimony to the painter’s love for Luther and his family.
But religion and friendship were personal, business was business. When it came to winning a profitable commission, Cranach was a spiritual whore, a brush for hire to the highest bidder. A court painter who basked in the patronage of the great and the not-so-good, he was far from fastidious about his subject-matter: he specialized, for example, in soft-porn cabinet paintings of naked nymphs and goddesses, simpering alluringly at their aristocratic patrons.11 And long after the Lutheran movement broke decisively from the old Church, Cranach repeatedly accepted commissions from its fiercest enemies. The ‘new aesthetic’ is nowhere in evidence in the work he produced for those clients. In 1534, Cranach produced a major Catholic work, the epitaph triptych for the ardently Catholic Prince George the Bearded of Saxony (now in Meissen Cathedral). In it the prince and his Polish wife, Barbara, kneel surrounded by (male) patron saints. The biblical texts that Koerner sees as the bane of Lutheran art are in evidence here, too, inscribed above the heads of the prince and his wife. The texts (in the Latin of the Catholic Vulgate Bible) are of a kind more often associated with Protestantism than Catholicism: above the prince’s head are a series of Pauline passages commanding women to be subservient to their husbands, and above his wife is the epistle of St Peter’s injunction to obedience to one’s prince.
But the central panel of the triptych is utterly traditional: Christ as the Man of Sorrows displaying his wounds, supported by the Virgin and St John, while a host of attendant angels carry the instruments of his Passion. It is before this image, traditionally associated both with intercession for the dead and with the sacrifice of the Mass, that George the Bearded and Princess Barbara kneel, the veneration of a cult image if ever there was one.
And during these same years, Cranach’s workshop was turning out scores of Catholic pictures for Catholic patrons, including Luther’s bête noire, Cardinal Albrecht, the Archbishop of Mainz. These included altarpieces for Albrecht’s cathedral, devotional panels of Christ as the Man of Sorrows (an image closely associated with the doctrine of transubstantiation), images of favourite Catholic saints, or of Mary assumed into heaven. Cranach and his assistants painted Cardinal Albrecht himself as Saint Jerome in his study (in a composition borrowed from a famous print by Dürer), and as witness to the miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory, a subject associated not only with transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass, but also with the release of souls from purgatory, and so absolute anathema to Luther. Characteristically, however, Cranach never drew Albrecht from the life, and probably never met him: instead, he copied Albrecht’s features from Dürer’s 1519 portrait.12
These Catholic pictures are disconcerting to anyone who sees inner conviction as essential to the integrity of great art. It is as if Saatchi & Saatchi had hired David Hockney to design PR portfolios for both Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill at the same time. It is true that divisions between Catholic and Protestant had not yet hardened irrevocably – Cardinal Albrecht had even sent Luther’s bride a wedding gift. Yet the mood and devotional purpose of these pictures were deeply alien to the new doctrines to which Cranach subscribed. A tradesman, of course, cannot afford to be too choosy about his customers, but the power and tenderness that he and his assistants infused into many of these Catholic pictures speaks of art’s ability to transcend ideology, however much Cranach’s more conscientiously didactic works might seek to deny it.
This is perhaps merely to demonstrate the chameleon adaptability of a commercial painter. But it does suggest that the decisive aesthetic break which Koerner associates with Cranach’s work from the 1520s to the 1550s can hardly be as absolute as he maintains. And it is certainly true that he often exaggerates, or at any rate mis describes, some of the contrasts he discerns between medieval and Lutheran religious sensibility. This Lutheran aesthetic, Koerner believes, broke decisively with the past in transforming art from a direct encounter with the sacred into a cognitive instrument, a didactic device in which understanding was everything, veneration banished. He therefore insists on the corresponding absence of this cognitive priority in medieval religion. At the heart of his argument lies a sharp distinction between the materiality and objectivity of medieval conceptions of the sacred, and the contrasting subjectivity of Lutheran approaches to the reception of the sacrament of the altar. In medieval Catholic ritual, he tells us, ‘it counted for nothing whether a lay person entered or even understood the goings on. The Mass was effective ex opere operato, “from the work done”, whenever and wherever a priest celebrated it.’ In the Lutheran world view, by contrast, ‘universal priesthood ... held each person responsible for making sacrament efficacious for them[selves].’13
Koerner here effectively articulates a modern version of an accusation often made by Lutherans at the time of the Reformation. Catholicism was external, magical and mechanical; Protestantism was interior and rooted in personal responsibility. Reformation polemic is thus recycled as considered historical generalization. As a description of medieval sacramental belief, however, it is quite simply mistaken. The medieval Church’s insistence that the sacraments worked ex opere operato was a claim about the dependable availability of God’s grace, but emphatically not a guarantee that grace would be effective for the recipient regardless of interior disposition. Essentially, the doctrine guaranteed the spiritual lives of ordinary people against wicked or inadequate priests. Mass might be celebrated by a saint, or by a clerical philanderer still reeking from his mistress’s or his boyfriend’s bed: but provided both had been duly ordained, and used the correct prayers, Christ would be just as truly present at the sinner’s Mass as at the saint’s. However, that presence, stupendous mystery as it was, was in itself no guarantee of benefit, either to celebrant or congregation. Medieval Catholics, just like sixteenth-century Protestants, thought that an unworthy or inattentive communicant not only received no blessing from the Eucharist, but on the contrary ate and drank damnation. Christ was objectively present even to the wicked; but the inner spiritual power and healing of the sacrament were available only to devout penitence and faith.
That indispensable condition is spelled out in one of the central communion devotions of the Middle Ages, the so-called Prayer of St Thomas Aquinas, routinely included in both medieval and modern missals as part of devout preparation for receiving the Host. Emphasizing the communicant’s personal unworthiness, the prayer asks for the interior gifts of reverence and humility, contrition and devotion, purity and faith, and hence for a right disposition in taking communion, so that ‘I may receive not merely the sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, but also its reality and power’ (non solum sacramentum ... sed etiam rem et virtutem sacramentum).
On this point, then, the theological contrast between externality and interiority which Koerner thinks contributes to so sharp a divide between a Protestant and a Catholic aesthetic is largely illusory. On the need for devout inwardness, medieval Catholics and early modern Lutherans were at one. We may therefore question the readings of pictures which Koerner deduces from that contrast. In the imagined objectivity of medieval worship, he tells us, ‘understanding was but an ornament to action,’ and ‘whatever thoughts the laity entertained affected the ex opere operato of sacrament only marginally.’14 And this, he thinks, had direct consequences for painting: the marginality of lay people in the central mysteries of religion was reflected in medieval depictions of their presence at those mysteries. Sure enough, he carries these convictions into the gallery, and they colour what he thinks he sees there. Among the pictures Koerner offers in support of this contention are two which may be familiar to visitors to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, The Exhumation of St Hubert, painted around 1437 in the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, and the anonymous Mass of Saint Giles of about 1500. In each case, Koerner’s a priori conviction of the theological marginality of the medieval laity is so strong that it causes him to misread what is plainly before him on the painted surface.
Van der Weyden’s Exhumation of St Hubert presents an idealized version of a historical event, the exhumation and enshrinement of the body of the saint in the church of St Pierre in Liège. The saint’s perfectly preserved body, uncoffined in the foreground, is being raised from its grave by a group of robed clerics. They in turn are surrounded by a crowd of well-dressed laypeople, and the whole action takes place before an altar on which rests a large reliquary casket. Behind the altar is a slatted wooden screen, through which peer crowds of would-be spectators. ‘Their access barred by a wooden grille ... their vision blocked by altar, altarpiece and clergy, the common folk ... cannot behold the uncorrupted flesh that the painter places front and centre.’ This, Koerner insists, is because the holy place before the altar was meant to be inaccessible. Paradoxically, he thinks, even though ‘the Church orchestrated an image-based piety’, in practice ‘it also restricted sight, exiling lay folk from what they yearned to behold.’15
To sustain this account of the picture, however, Koerner is obliged to ignore the presence of the large group of laypeople who stand in the foreground, crowding the sacred space between the body of the saint and the altar with its images and relics. The six clergy in the foreground – two bishops, two priests, and two clerks in minor orders – are outnumbered by fifteen laypeople, men, women and children, who cluster round them and enjoy an unhindered view of the saint’s ‘uncorrupted flesh’. The larger crowd of laypeople corralled behind the screen, therefore, are excluded not, as Koerner says, because they are the laity, but because they are the plebs, the many-headed multitude. The divisions the picture displays are not theological – between clerical and lay – but social, between rich and poor. And, as Koerner himself argues elsewhere in the book, that distinction would persist, even in sacred things, and would if anything deepen, after the Reformation. Luther’s colleague Philip Melancthon, the great theorist of confessional Lutheranism, wrote dismissively of the ‘stupid people’, the ‘mad riff-raff’, ‘Mr Everybody’, ‘the vulgar folks’. At Luther’s insistence, social distinctions were preserved in the conduct of Protestant worship, and Lutheran church seating and proximity to sacred space, in the form of closeness to the altar, were carefully regulated according to social status.
Koerner projects the same polarities into his readings of other pictures of the medieval Mass. In the National Gallery’s Mass of Saint Giles, for example, the saint elevates the Host at the moment of consecration. Behind him, two attendants kneel, laymen to judge by the long-sleeved gown and lack of tonsure of the one in front, who holds a tall torch aloft in honour of the sacrament. In the left foreground the emperor Charlemagne kneels to the side of the curtained altar, while his entourage, men and women, stand behind. The king’s eyes are lifted to the Host, his hands raised and open in the conventional gesture of adoration and welcome which laypeople were expected to adopt at this point in the Mass (Richard II adopts the same posture in the Wilton Diptych). But both Charlemagne and the painting’s viewer are distracted by the appearance of an angel, who descends from the top of the frame towards the altar, holding a letter of absolution for the secret sins which the emperor had been too ashamed to confess, but pardon for which St Giles’s prayers and the virtue of the Mass had procured.
Once again, Koerner interprets this painting as a portrayal of lay exclusion from sight of the sacred. ‘Meanwhile,’ he tells us, ‘blocked as usual from the proceedings ... by a green curtain ... stand the people ... Able to glance surreptitiously from the ritual’s periphery, they struggle to get a look at its centre, that white disc in which there is nothing to behold.’ In fact, no one in the picture except the emperor struggles to look at the Host. The servers at the Mass could see it if they wished, but instead they focus on the penitent Charlemagne, who, himself a layman, has a ringside seat. The mixed entourage behind the curtain, understandably for courtiers in attendance on their master’s routine devotions, look bored or abstracted. Far from struggling to see the Host, they face anywhere except towards the altar. One of them, a woman, has indeed pushed the altar curtain aside and holds it back, but she does this not so that she can see, but so that the emperor at his prayer-desk can see. She herself gazes calmly out of the picture, at the spectator.
Curtains, screens, archways and barriers of one sort or another certainly feature in several of the pictures of the Mass which Koerner discusses, but they function as emblems of proprietorship – enclosures symbolizing the availability of the Mass to some laypeople rather than others – rather than as excluders of laypeople as such. Contrary to Koerner’s reiterated claim, laypeople do inhabit these sacred spaces, but usually with the best of rights to do so, because they are the patrons who have paid for the priest, and the Mass is being celebrated, and, in some cases, a picture of it painted, for their specific benefit. These pictures therefore reflect an aspect of medieval Christianity against which Luther was to protest: the fact that the Mass could be bought, celebrated at family or guild altars to which outsiders had restricted access. Here was indeed a profound difference between Catholic and Protestant, but it is not the one Koerner claims to discern, and I doubt whether it will sustain the stark and simple aesthetic divergence which even his brilliant advocacy seeks to discover there.
Perhaps fortunately, religion was never Cranach’s only inspiration. Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by classical representations of the human body. The devout Dürer had channelled this risqué interest mainly into statuesque representations of Adam and Eve, but Cranach was equally attracted by pagan mythology. Unlike Dürer, there is no evidence that he drew much from the human nude. Instead, he wove the stuff of fantasies – nymphs and fauns, heroes and goddesses, the judgment of Paris, Venus comforting Cupid stung by bees, the three graces, the people of the golden age gambolling naked in a garden of delights.16 In these jewel-like idylls, Dürer’s beefy Amazons have been replaced by impossibly nubile and lynx-eyed temptresses, Venus gazing slyly at the viewer, drowsy nymphs dozing under Latin inscriptions forbidding anyone to disturb, but whose inviting posture suggests something entirely different. These sixteenth-century Lolitas were quite new in German art. Their sly eroticism and elegant stylization fascinated twentieth-century artists, from Picasso to Giacometti, but are perhaps the flip side of the conventional misogyny reflected in another profitable line from Cranach’s studio, his genre pictures of women deceiving men – the pickpocket prostitute, the adulterous wife swearing her innocence, Judith with the head of Holofernes, Salome with the head of Saint John. Yet Cranach’s smiling seductresses have a more benign aspect as well. They are images of that nostalgia for an idealized and innocent human sexuality that fascinates precisely because it always eludes us. When in 2008 the Royal Academy staged a major exhibition of Cranach’s work, the publicity material displaying one of these alluring Venuses was banned from the London Underground as unacceptably sexy, only for the ban to be lifted a few days later.17 Across the centuries, Wittenberg’s stolidly prosperous evangelical craftsman seemed suddenly to wink.