Remembering ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1528 MATTHIAS GRÜNEWALD, 1529, LUCAS CRANACH the ELDER, 1553, Artists, (August 5,) From the #Episcopal calendar. Dürer, Grünewald, and Cranach the Elder were all born at the beginning of the 1470s. They all became artists at a time of great change. The first two died just over a decade after Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. The third lived much longer into the turbulent Reformation period. As the Renaissance brought a great rediscovery of ancient knowledge, it stimulated ferment in social, political, and religious ideas. Along with this came dramatic changes in artistic expression. Of the three, Grünewald remained most faithful to the reigning traditions of late Gothic Christian painting. His paintings are notable for their extraordinary emotion and evocation of the agony of Christ. His dead Christ is utterly lifeless, while his resurrected Christ seems to fly out of the tomb in a burst of unearthly light. His best known and largest piece is the complex, multipart Isenheim altar piece. Unfortunately the majority of his works were lost in a shipwreck. Dürer was his almost exact contemporary, and like him was interested in the new religious ideas of Luther and his contemporaries. He differed, however, in his relationship to the new ideas of the painters of the Italian Renaissance. He brought many of their ideas about perspective and the employment of classical themes into northern Europe. He strove to bring many of the religious ideas of the Reformation into his paintings. One of his best loved drawings is the praying hands, his tribute to his older brother. This brother was on his way to being a talented artist when he pledged to spend years in a mine to finance his younger brother’s studies at the Nuremberg Academy. When Albert returned after four years, already an acclaimed artist, ready to sponsor his loyal brother, that brother’s hands had been so mangled in his time in the mines that he could no longer hold a pen or brush. Dürer made the beautiful and much loved drawing of his brother’s damaged, but faithful hands. Cranach outlived the other two by more than two decades. He is another giant of German Renaissance painting, noted particularly for his portraits. In fact the image most of us have of Martin Luther’s face comes from one of the portraits by his friend Lucas Cranach. These three men employed their extraordinary God given talents to portray not only scenes from scripture and saints of the Church, but also a wide range of spiritual ideas and emotions, challenging people of their own time and ever since to take them into their own stjamestigard.org/sermons/2010/08Aug2010insert.pdf For more information, go to: satucket/lectionary/Durer_Grunewald_Cranach.htm More on Durer: metmuseum.org/toah/hd/durr/hd_durr.htm More on Grunewald: ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/grunewald/ more on Cranach: artbible.info/art/biography/lucas-cranach-the-elder
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:58:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015