The unlikely subject of Germany’s most recent blockbuster exhibition was Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553), the resident artist at the electoral court of Saxony in Wittenberg. The show, a sprawling display of some 100 paintings shown together with a small number of drawings and prints, opened at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in November and can be seen at the Royal Academy in London from March 8 through June 8. In Frankfurt it drew record crowds of visitors and was hailed in Der Spiegel (Germany’s equivalent of Time magazine) as the art event of the year. There was even a review in The New Yorker—a considerable feat for any occurrence at a distance from the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers. The Royal Academy will give Cranach his first-ever major exhibition in England. All very impressive. But why Cranach? And why now?

Cranach’s work has not traditionally been ranked at the same level as that of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the quintessential altdeutsche artist, nor at the level of Dürer’s stylistic opposite, the enigmatic Mathis Gothart-Nithart, more commonly known as Grünewald (c. 1480–1528), the master of the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. However, it can be argued that Cranach’s work fits perfectly between these two artistic poles. His earliest paintings and prints, executed in Vienna between 1501 and 1504, are full of Sturm und Drang, encapsulating the barely tamed expressionist side of the German Renaissance. Two monumental woodcuts from this period showing crowded Calvary scenes rival Dürer’s "Apocalypse" series of 1498 both in scale and in complexity of technique. The bodies of the two thieves in both prints are absurdly contorted around the beams of their crosses, their extreme poses prepared in two ravishing chalk drawings on colored paper in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett. A painted equivalent is a Crucifixion that came from the Schottenstift in Vienna and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum there. Cranach’s early style is so different from that of his later oeuvre that scholars used to attribute these works to the anonymous hand of the so-called "Pseudo-Grünewald"; it was only on the occasion of the first major survey of his art held in Dresden in 1899 that they were widely accepted as being by Cranach.

The artist’s stylistic progressiveness was linked to a probing intellectualism of a kind that seems to have been in demand in Vienna around the turn of the century; indeed, in 1501, Emperor Maximilian founded a humanistic faculty at the university there. Cranach received commissions from the resident humanists, and portraits, such as that of the poet laureate Johannes Cuspian, are full of complex iconological references to a humanistic world view as well as to Christian symbolism.

In 1504 Cranach was called to the court in Wittenberg, marking the beginning of one of the longest periods of employment of any court artist in history—a successful career that came to an end only with the artist’s death 49 years later in 1553. The Städel Museum owns an important work from the first phase of Cranach’s Wittenberg period: the so-called "Sippenaltar" from 1509, a triptych depicting the Holy Kinship of the Virgin with the Christ child, Joseph and Mary’s mother, Anne. The altar, which is one of the centerpieces of the exhibition, was completed immediately upon the artist’s return from a trip to the Netherlands, where he had been sent on a diplomatic mission the previous year.
 
There he encountered the work of such "modern" artists as Quentin Massys (1466–1530), whose paintings were influenced by Italian models. Cranach’s images of the Virgin and Child also reflect the art of Perugino (1446–1524) and Raphael (1483–1520). The Frankfurt "Sippenaltar" depicts figures in fashionable costumes set in the context of an intricate interior that reaches beyond the central panel to incorporate both of the side wings. Cranach also must have studied the exterior, workaday sides of Netherlandish altarpieces that were often painted in grisaille, a technique deploying tones of a single color, most often gray, that he went on to use himself in this and other commissions.

During his first decade in Wittenberg, Cranach’s style became calmer, more simplified, and the Netherlandish journey was undoubtedly a catalyst for certain aspects of this overall development. More important, however, was Cranach’s role as a court artist and his prolific output in this capacity—there are about 1,000 panel paintings extant, and it is likely that the Cranach workshop produced as many paintings on canvas or linen, though only a few survive. This astonishing productivity was dependent, of course, on a highly efficient workshop. A recently published study by the German paintings restorer Gunnar Heydenreich provides far more detail than has been available about this studio practice (Lucas Cranach the Elder: Painting Materials, Techniques and Workshop Practice, Amsterdam University Press, 2007). Heydenreich’s research is groundbreaking, especially if one considers that art history often still adheres to the ideal vision of the artist-genius creating in inspired isolation. From such a perspective Cranach’s later work always has been seen as merely a "fizzling out" of the early fervor.