Old Masters
Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve
260 x 216 mm, 144 pages, hardback, 80 colour illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
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ISBN: 9781903470541
Essays by Caroline Campbell, Curator at the Courtauld Gallery; Susan Foister, Senior curator at the National Gallery, London; Dr Stephanie Buck, Curator of Drawings at The Courtauld Gallery.
This is the catalogue to the first exhibition in Britain to be devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) who was one of the greatest German Renaissance painters. Cranach spent the majority of his career in Wittenberg, as court artist to the powerful Electors of Saxony, and was a close associate of the Protestant theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546). Throughout his career, Cranach devoted his considerable artistic talents to the furthering of the Lutheran cause. He found in Eve’s temptation of Adam a subject which was ideally suited to his outstanding gifts as a portrayer of landscape, animals and the female nude, and to which Protestant theologians like Luther did not object.
The Courtauld’s Adam and Eve is arguably the most beautiful of Cranach’s fifty or more depictions of this subject. It brilliantly combines devotional meaning with pictorial elegance and invention. The scene is set in a forest clearing where Eve stands before the Tree of Knowledge, caught in the act of handing an apple to a bewildered Adam. This exhibition explores the making and meaning of this Protestant and courtly masterpiece, and the contexts in which it was made and seen. It will incorporate much conservation and technical research. More than twenty loans of paintings, drawings and prints will be drawn from major British and international collections, including the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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