Half figure of Judith

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Half figure of Judith, former Dessau (loss of war)

The half-length of Judith is the title of a drawing that is attributed to either Lucas Cranach the Elder or his son Hans Cranach . The drawing, made with silver pencil on paper, was once in the State Gallery in Dessau , but is one of the losses of the Second World War .

classification

In Jakob Rosenberg's 1960 Cranach drawing catalog, the picture is cataloged under number 50 and in Michael Hofbauer's Cranach drawing catalog (2010) under number 167. According to Rosenberg, the size of the drawing was 149 × 141 mm.

The exact date of the work is not known, the following assumptions were made:

  • Girshausen (1936): around 1512/15
  • Lilienfein (1942): 1512-1515
  • Rosenberg (1960): around 1535/40
  • Hofbauer (2010): around 1525/30

Image description

Half-length figure of Judith , turned to the right, in contemporary slit fashion of the 16th century, with necklaces and a feathered hat . In her hands indicated a raised sword and the severed head of Holofernes . Her head and plumed hat are more detailed than her clothing, sword and holofernes head. The initials IVM ( Israhel van Meckenem ) were added by a later hand in the lower area of ​​the picture . The edge of the drawing was pasted over with paper strips for fastening. The sheet, which is rounded at the top, was also partially covered by a passepartout with a smaller image detail. On the back there was the drawing "Saint George on horseback" (Rosenberg cat. No. 51).

Style-critical consideration

Judith, located in San Francisco, is almost congruent with the missing drawing

The sheet has been ascribed to Lucas Cranach the Elder or his immediate circle at the latest since its discussion by Woldemar von Seidlitz in 1881, since both the Judith drawing on the front and the Georgs drawing on the reverse match the motifs of works by the Cranach Circle. Since the sheet was destroyed in the Second World War, no modern material-technical investigations etc. The classification in the complete works of Cranach must be limited to style-critical comparisons based on preserved old reproductions.

Theo Ludwig Girshausen (1936) remarked that the drawing goes far ahead of the paintings with the Judith motif from around 1530 (e.g. Friedländer / Rosenberg (1932) No. 190) known to him at the time and is more like one Proximity to the Salome on the woodcut "Beheading of John the Baptist" (Lippmann 27) around 1512/15. He therefore dated that time. Girshausen also named a similar woodcut from around 1512 for the depiction of George on the reverse.

Rosenberg (1960), on the other hand, saw the drawing as a preliminary study for the Judith painting, which has since been published and is now in San Francisco and largely congruent, which, due to his signature (snake with lowered wings), should not have been made before 1537. Rosenberg also stated that the reverse depiction of George was closer to the Georgs painting FR 117 (1932) from 1520/25, which was formerly in Dessau, than the woodcut used by Girshausen. Hofbauer (2010) rejected a direct connection between the drawing and the painting in San Francisco, since the drawing could not be considered as a direct draft sketch due to the only vague suggestion of Judith's clothes and the head of Holofernes, while a more evident connection was the depiction of George on the reverse would exist with the painting FR 117 (1932), which would favor an analogous dating to the time around 1525.

Werner Schade (1974) explained that Cranach did not begin to turn to the Judith theme until 1530. He placed the emergence of the Judith theme in the context of the hardening religious fronts at the time of the Reformation . According to this argumentation, Judith would be a symbol of the Reformation-minded princes for the triumph over an apparently overpowering opponent, in this case the Catholic princes around Emperor Karl V. Due to the seriousness of the situation, the depictions of Judith from the Cranach workshop also leave them Coquetry is missing, as is characteristic of the Salome depictions of the Cranach workshop, which were created around the same time and have very similar motifs . The heads of John the Baptist in the Salome pictures and Holofernes in the Judith pictures are largely identical.

Schade has already placed the drawing in connection with other works attributed to the Cranach son Hans. Hofbauer (2010) noticed a similarity between the drawings in Hans Cranach's travel sketchbook, the drawing with the “Silver Age”, which is kept in Berlin and also attributed to Hans Cranach, and the Judith drawing. He then attributed the drawing to Hans Cranach rather than his father, whose style-typical elements he completely missed in the drawing. In this context it should be noted that the Judith painting in San Francisco is also attributed to Hans Cranach there.

Hofbauer explains the asymmetrical arrangement of the drawing on the trimmed sheet by the fact that the trimming is coordinated with the Georgs drawing on the reverse side, which extends harmoniously over the entire picture space. The half-length of Judith was probably already drawn before the sheet was trimmed to its later format.

The depiction of Judith as a half-figure slightly turned to the side with a raised sword in rich contemporary-Renaissance clothing, laying the head of Holofernes on a wall at the lower edge of the picture, was a frequently depicted motif in the Cranach workshop. The majority of the known representations of this type are held against a neutral black background. In isolated cases, landscape elements appear at most as a window in this background. Therefore, the missing Dessau drawing, which appears unfinished, already contains all the ingredients of the motif. The position of Judith to the right has a special position. With the exception of the painting in San Francisco, all other half-figure Judith representations of the Cranach Circle face to the left.

literature

  • Max Jakob Friedländer : Hand drawings by German masters ..., Dessau 1914, No. 27
  • E. Schilling: Old German master drawings, Frankfurt a. M. 1934, p. 42
  • Theo Ludwig Girshausen: The hand drawings of Lucas Cranachs d. Ä., Diss. Frankfurt a. M. 1936/37, pp. 28/29, cat.no.22
  • Friedrich Thöne: Lucas Cranach the Elder Master Drawings, Burg near Munich 1939, p. 15
  • Heinrich Lilienfein : Lucas Cranach and his time, Bielefeld and Leipzig 1942, plate 47
  • Jakob Rosenberg in The Art Quarterly XVIII, 1955, p. 164 ff.
  • Jakob Rosenberg: The drawings by Lucas Cranach d. Ä., In: Monuments of German Art, published by the German Association for Art History, Berlin 1960, p. 24, no. 50
  • Werner Schade: The Cranach family of painters , Dresden 1974, ISBN 978-3570090183 , Fig. 191.
  • Michael Hofbauer: Cranach - The drawings , Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 978-3862280186 , No. 167

References and comments

  1. These catalog numbers are used to clearly identify the work, as at least 20 other Judith half-figures are known from the Cranach workshop, including another formerly in Dessau. These numbers are referenced in the specialist literature.
  2. Rosenberg 1960, p. 24
  3. ^ Woldemar von Seidlitz : Drawings of old German masters in Dessau. In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections. Issue 2, 1881, ISSN  0934-618X , p. 8
  4. 80 × 56 cm, oil on wood, San Francisco, Palace of the Legion of Honor, FR 360 (1979)
  5. In the Cranach literature the unanimous opinion exists that the change of the Cranach logo from the snake with standing wings to the snake with reclining wings was caused by the death of Hans Cranach in 1537.
  6. "Saint George on Horseback", linden wood, 41 × 27.5 cm, formerly in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie in Dessau, stolen from the forester's house in Uhlenstein / Harz in 1945, since then lost. Friedländer / Rosenberg (1932) No. 117, Friedländer / Rosenberg (1979) No. 139.
  7. Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv.-No. Z 4
  8. Berlin-Dahlem, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. No. 385
  9. See the Judith paintings in the Cranach workshop in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, in the Metropolitan Museum New York, in the State Museum Schwerin, etc.
  10. See all paintings mentioned above.
  11. See the Judith paintings in the Cranach workshop in the State Art Collections in Kassel, in the Grunewald Hunting Lodge in Berlin and in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

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