'Dürer and Cranach' at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid

Written by Howard Fossburg Friday, 09 December 2011 23:40

MADRID, SPAIN - The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany, an exhibition that focuses on the work of two of the greatest artists of the age, who represented different trends within art. It features 234 works including paintings, drawings, prints, goldsmiths’ work, and other decorative objects, and is the first exhibition in Spain to offer an overall survey of the German Renaissance. The exhibition will be on view through January 6, 2008.

Opening the autumn season in Madrid, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting an ambitious exhibition that reveals the richness and variety within German Renaissance art. This school had its own identity, distinct from both the Flemish and Italian models, although closely related. The exhibition is organised within the framework of the long-term agreement between the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, which covers exhibitions as well as educational and other types of activities. The main focus of the agreement is the organisation of exhibitions that are shown divided between the two institutions, allowing for large-scale events of this kind.

Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany offers a survey of German art from the late 15th to the mid-16th centuries and focuses on two of the greatest artists of the period, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), and to a lesser extent Hans Baldung Grien (1485-1545) and Albrecht Altdorfer (ca.1480-1538). Also included are works by other significant painters who were influenced by these leading artists. The exhibition looks at a period in art history and a group of artists that are rarely the subject of exhibitions in Spain.

One of the exhibition’s principal aims and attractions is that of offering a global perspective on German Renaissance art, both with regard to the wide variety of different media in which artists worked and the importance that each enjoyed at the time, as well as the role that art played in the political and religious changes that came about during this turbulent period. With this aim in mind, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, intaglio prints and woodcuts (the latter reflecting the importance of the invention of printing for the dissemination of knowledge), designs, decorative works of art, armour, and military and hunting weapons. Taken together, they offer an idea not just of the art of the time but also of religion, society and politics in a period that witnessed major transformations brought about by the Reformation and the birth of the great international empires.

Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany covers a period of major changes and social and political conflicts, all of which were reflected in art. The exhibition emphasises the contradictory co-existence of different artistic and cultural options. On the one hand these offered a measured and controlled image of reality whose greatest expression is to be found in some aspects of the work of Dürer (above all in his theoretical writings). This option contrasted with the desire to represent the world in a state of conflict and drama, characteristic of artists such as Altdorfer, Grünewald, and Cranach and even Dürer himself in series such as The Apocalypse.

The exhibition also highlights and analyses two very different functions of the work of art. While the first part of the exhibition focuses on its aesthetic role, in the second it shows how the image – without losing its aesthetic value - could acquire more practical and functional characteristics associated with religion, the depiction of political power and war.

The exhibition layout - The exhibition’s argument is reflected in its layout, which is divided into two main parts. The first is entitled Artists and their World and can be seen at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, while the second part, A World in Conflict, is shown at Fundación Caja Madrid.

Artists and their World aims to reveal artists’ personal concerns and preoccupations: how they saw themselves and their environment, how they saw their professional status, their idea of religion, their aesthetic intentions and the way they used new technologies such as printing. This part of the exhibition is divided into the following sections:

Room 1. Pride and melancholy. An Image of the German Artist reveals the way in which German artists articulated a vision of themselves and their surroundings from the starting-point of their own experiences as creative figures with regard to both workshop practices and intellectual reflection on the act of creation. The subjects that interested them – the artist’s own awareness of his status, imitation of nature, his relationship with his surroundings and with God – are represented in this room through several self-portraits, among them Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514), a masterpiece of printmaking, which can be read as a spiritual representation of the artist.

Room 2. Nuremberg. This section focuses on the creative environment in which Dürer worked during his years of training. His native city was one of the most important economic, commercial and cultural centres in Germany at the time, in which the lack of a guild structure favoured a much more individual relationship between artists and patrons and a greater degree of self-awareness on the part of the artist. Issues such as the influence of Dürer’s father – a goldsmith by profession – and his interest in books and the world of publishing are analysed here.

Room 3. Italy: “Here I am a gentleman”. This phrase of Dürer’s refers to the way he was treated in a country of great artists such as Leonardo and Raphael. This room offers an analysis of a number of the issues that most interested Dürer during his trips to Italy. They include landscape, which was a leading theme in 16th-century German art, and the motif of the Virgin and Child, repeated through the artist’s career and represented here by some of his finest examples. During his second trip to Italy, Dürer was particularly interested in proportion, i.e., the correct anatomical depiction of human and animal bodies, and the arrangement of figures in a three-dimensional space, in other words perspective, both crucial issues for the future course of his career.

Room 4. In the Collector’s Cabinet (I): witches, monsters, nudes. This section contrasts Dürer’s idealised model with the more sensual, carnal and realist version proposed by artists such as Cranach and Grien. Their work falls within a style that featured numerous references to a dark, wild side of life and an obsession (particularly evident in Grien) with the subject of witchcraft. The painting Two Witches (1523) from the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt is one of the most disturbing and strange paintings executed in 16th-century Europe. A similar taste for the enigmatic is to be found in Lucas Cranach’s mythological compositions, which are remote from any classicising aesthetic.

Room 5. In the Collector’s Cabinet (II): new ideas of beauty. This room looks at the way painters approached themes such as ugliness, the grotesque, old age and sickness. Dürer and in particular Baldung Grien in his remorseless investigation of the subject of old age in the human face, focused on this less agreeable aspect of the human image to a much greater extent than is evident in Italian Renaissance art.

Visit The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza at: www.museothyssen.org/
Visit The Fundación Caja Madrid at : www.fundacioncajamadrid.es