Lucas Cranach's: Fashioning Women at Cornell

Wednesday, 03 August 2005 15:57

ITHACA, NY.-The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents Lucas Cranach’s Judith and Lucretia: Fashioning Women in the Northern Renaissance. With two superb panel paintings from the 1520s by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder at its center, this exhibition examines the roles of women in the visual arts of the Northern Renaissance and their duality as virtuous beings and temptresses. Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1525), on loan from Syracuse University, and Lucretia Committing Suicide (1529), from the Blaffer Foundation in Houston, show Cranach’s fascination with the jarring contrast between femininity and male violence, and with images of legendary women who caused the downfall of powerful men. The exhibition will also include prints presenting female embodiments of virtues and vices, goddesses and heroines from ancient history, and witches by Northern European artists such as Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, Hendrik Goltzius, and Jacob Matham. These works will also show conventions of depicting female dress, and especially the Northern practice of clothing ancient personages as contemporary women, such as Albrecht Dürer’s casting of the biblical Whore of Babylon as a Venetian courtesan of the 1490s. Works expressing the Renaissance paradox of female nudity—which could connote both purity and promiscuity—will also be included.

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