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A Lutheran idyll: Lucas Cranach the Elder's Cupid Complaining to Venus
Author(s) -
D’Ors Pablo Pérez
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2007.00337.x
Subject(s) - painting , idyll , poetry , fresco , art , interpretation (philosophy) , art history , literature , procession , german , philosophy , theology , linguistics
This article studies Cranach's Cupid complaining to Venus paintings and their inscriptions, focusing on their relationships to other texts and images made in Wittenberg in the same years. The moralizing use of the pseudo‐Theocritean Idyll XIX in the paintings and their inscriptions is connected to a trend of neo‐Latin versions of the same poem, inaugurated in the mid‐1520s by Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). The poem of the inscriptions was written by the scholar Georg Sabinus (1508–1560), a former student of Melanchthon's. This, together with another similar poem by his tutor, was first published in a music book, Georg Rhau's Enchiridion utriusque musicae practicae (1536). Cranach also intended a religious interpretation of his Cupid and Venus pictures, a reading that is encouraged more explicitly in the illustrations of the 1538 edition of the Enchiridion . The paintings are characteristic of the preoccupations of German painters and scholars in their subject‐matter, charged with moral and religious overtones, and also in the way in which they were meant to engage the viewer as interpreter.