Lucas Cranach’s Legacies – ‘Primitive’ and Rooted identities of Art and Nation at the European Fin de Siècle
- Submitting institution
-
Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 25946105
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
-
- Title of journal
- FNG Research
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 1
- Volume
- 2020
- Issue
- 5
- ISSN
- 2343-0850
- Open access status
- Other exception
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 12,000 word article is the distillation of new research presented at two conferences: ‘Reformation Images’ (Veste Coburg, Oct. 2017) and ‘European Revivals: Cultural Mythologies around 1900’ (National Gallery of Scotland-University of Edinburgh-Finnish National Gallery, December 2017), selected by double-blind peer-review for the international open access, FNG Research Online. Taking as its key focus the 1899 Dresden Cranach Exhibition, the article explores a hitherto neglected, yet substantial nineteenth-century revival and new reception of Lucas Cranach (the Elder) as a torchbearer of Reformation art and its legacies. The article reveals how Cranach’s work and image acquires developed significance in contexts of Romantic artistic revivals entwining Protestant and Catholic cultural memory. It further illuminates revivals of Cranach’ work, promoted by Gustav Waagen and Wilhelm Lübke through newer attributions, and via cultural narratives of national identity-formation, which become pivotal in a shift from ‘revivalism’ to reinvention. The article sheds light on the particular salience of Cranach’s art’s reception for expanding geo-cultural interest in the potency of a Northern spirit of art for new nineteenth-century mythologies of nationhood, positioning Cranach’s Reformation memory, his perceived ‘populism’, as an inspiration for a modern so-called ‘primitive’ art. Yet, the key discovery is to open knowledge of how these Cranach ‘reinventions’ stimulate competing discourses of Cranach’s modern artistic and cultural resonance. Drawing on an extensive, unexamined reception of the 1899 Cranach Dresden exhibition, it develops original new insights into the exhibition’s cultural centrality, and its projections of Cranach’s specific – and broader significance as an emblem of both a transnational and ‘rooted’ artistic inheritance. In sum, this would reframe Cranach’s late nineteenth-century Reformation memory as a complex emblem of both rootedness and difference, linking a narrative of his Northern Renaissance-Reformation legacy with the period’s most ambitious – and conflicted – expressions of cultural and political modernity.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -