Melancholia is an oil-on-panel painting by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, created in 1532. It is held in the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Melancholia is an oil-on-panel painting by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, created in 1532. It is held in the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Melancholia depicts three naked babies who, with the help of sticks, try to roll a large ball through the hoop. A winged woman, lost in thought, is slicing a cane, perhaps intending to make another hoop. She is the personification of melancholy, similar to the winged genius from the engraving of the same name by Albrecht Dürer, executed 18 years before the painting of Cranach.
According to the ideals of the Renaissance, the whole world was based on analogies. So, melancholy at that time was associated with Saturn, a dog, carpentry. Many details of the picture are a reference to these analogies: the jump of witches in a black cloud, and an army in which soldiers fall from their horses.
The composition of the painting is distinctly horizontal. The Unterlinden Museum in Colmar owns a vertical version from the same year which presents a number of similarities.
Albert of Brandenburg was a German cardinal, elector, Archbishop of Mainz from 1514 to 1545, and Archbishop of Magdeburg from 1513 to 1545.
Melancholia or melancholy is a concept found throughout ancient, medieval, and premodern medicine in Europe that describes a condition characterized by markedly depressed mood, bodily complaints, and sometimes hallucinations and delusions.
Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced with enthusiasm. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. Cranach also painted religious subjects, first in the Catholic tradition, and later trying to find new ways of conveying Lutheran religious concerns in art. He continued throughout his career to paint nude subjects drawn from mythology and religion.
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, displays around 750 paintings from the 15th to the 18th centuries. It includes major Italian Renaissance works as well as Dutch and Flemish paintings. Outstanding works by German, French, and Spanish painters of the period are also among the gallery's attractions.
The National Gallery of Denmark is the Danish national gallery, located in the centre of Copenhagen.
Master IW, also Monogramist I.W., was a Bohemian or Saxon Renaissance painter, trained in the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, active between 1520 and 1550 mainly in north-west Bohemia.
Melancholia was one of the four temperaments in proto-psychology and pre-modern medicine, representing a state of low mood.
Melencolia I is a large 1514 engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. Its central subject is an enigmatic and gloomy winged female figure thought to be a personification of melancholia – melancholy. Holding her head in her hand, she stares past the busy scene in front of her. The area is strewn with symbols and tools associated with craft and carpentry, including an hourglass, weighing scales, a hand plane, a claw hammer, and a saw. Other objects relate to alchemy, geometry or numerology. Behind the figure is a structure with an embedded magic square, and a ladder leading beyond the frame. The sky contains a rainbow, a comet or planet, and a bat-like creature bearing the text that has become the print's title.
The Last Supper of Jesus and the Twelve Apostles has been a popular subject in Christian art, often as part of a cycle showing the Life of Christ. Depictions of the Last Supper in Christian art date back to early Christianity and can be seen in the Catacombs of Rome.
Adam and Eve is a pair of paintings by German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder, dating from 1528, housed in the Uffizi, Florence, Italy. There are other paintings by the same artist with the same title, depicting the subjects either together in a double portrait or separately in a pair of portraits, for instance at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Law and Gospel is one of a number of thematically linked, allegorical panel paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder from about 1529. The paintings, intended to illustrate Lutheran ideas of salvation, are exemplars of Lutheran Merkbilder, which were simple, didactic illustrations of Christian doctrine.
Cupid Complaining to Venus is an oil painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Nearly 20 similar works by Cranach and his workshop are known, from the earliest dated version in Güstrow Palace of 1527 to one in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, dated to 1545, with the figures in a variety of poses and differing in other details. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the number of extant versions suggests that this was one of Cranach's most successful compositions.
Law and Grace is considered one of the most important paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder. This work, in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague, is one of the two oldest known versions of this theme and was executed in 1529. It is also called the Prague type and provided the model for a series of other paintings including an early-16th-century copy that is also kept in the Prague National Gallery's collection of Old European art. It is the best-known and most influential allegory depicting the fundamental tenets of Luther's reform of the church.
The Prague Altarpiece of Lucas Cranach the Elder portrays the Virgin Mary and female saints was, at the time it was made, the second most important altarpiece in St Vitus Cathedral. The altarpiece was most probably brought to Prague as a commission by Emperor Maximilian I. The reason for this could have been the betrothal of his granddaughter Mary to Louis II of Hungary, the engagement of Ferdinand I and Anna Jagiellon (1515) or the coronation of Mary of Habsburg as Queen of Bohemia (1522). A hundred years later, in 1619, the altarpiece fell victim to Calvinist iconoclasm. The figures of the female saints were cut out of it and its central part was destroyed.
The Judgment of Paris is a 1528 painting by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. It depicts the myth of Paris, Prince of Troy, selecting the fairest goddess from among Minerva, Juno, and Venus. Cranach likely based his depiction on medieval poetry or romances. The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Caritas is an oil on panel painting by German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. The painting is kept in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
The painting Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder is part of the collections of old European art of the National Gallery Prague. It comes from the Cistercian monastery in Osek near Duchcov, from where it was acquired in 1949.
Venus and Cupid with a Honeycomb is an oil painting by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the masters of the German Renaissance. It was probably executed in 1531 after Cranach met Georg Sabinus, a German poet, diplomat and academic at the University of Wittenberg. It is displayed in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. There are twenty-four paintings on this subject, replicated many times by the painter, including Venus and Cupid with a Honeycomb which belongs to the very first series that began in 1509. Another well known versions is Cupid Complaining to Venus, dated c. 1526–27 and preserved at the National Gallery in London.
Melancholia is a 1532 oil painting by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. It is now in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France. Its inventory number is 83.5.1.
The Schneeberg Altarpiece is a Lutheran winged altarpiece created in 1539 by Lucas Cranach the Elder for the Church of St. Wolfgang in Schneeberg in Saxony, Germany. The altarpiece was commissioned in 1531–1532 by the Elector of Saxony John I of Saxony and installed in the church in 1539, making it the first Protestant altarpiece of Reformation which is considered a Saxon masterpiece of art.