Cathy's Art Diary

Wonderful exhibition at the Borghese Gallery in Rome using works by Lucas Cranach to compare the Southern and Northern Renaissance. The gallery used the works in its own collection of Southern Renaissance works to contrast with works by Cranach. On the whole the Northern works stood up well although you had to bare in mind that the Northern and Southern views of beauty were different. It would have been good to have more time. We were booked into the limited 2 hour slot and had to do the exhibition and the gallery which sadly needed at least half an hour with the Caravaggio’s! Oh for a longer holiday when we could have gone back!

Exhibition of the work of Lucas Cranach at the Royal Academy . This was a stunning exhibition as it confounded my previously held impressions of Cranach’s work. I’d thought of him as a painter of Adam and Eve’s and slightly dodgy Venus’s however the early part of this exhibition showed him as a talented painter in the Northern European tradition. He became the painter for the court of the Electors of Saxony working not only on paintings but also banners and decorations. The tape tour also showed him as a business man. He became the only apothecary in Wittenberg thereby having access to cheap pigments and controlling the supply. He was also a printer and at that time painted portraits of boards of the same size and wood as the end blocks of books. It also showed his role in the early reformation and his relationship with Martin Luther, however he also managed to continue to work for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg painting him as St Jerome in his study. To play favourites in the exhibi...