A Princess raped by St Chrysostomos

In the 15th century numerous printed illustrations of the subject were in circulation, showing the saint in accordance with the legend unclothed and crawling on all fours through the wilderness. Dürer's engraving from 1496 bestowed this formula with a new accent by shifting the figure of the saint into the background and positioning the defiled King's daughter naked and with her child on a cliff in the foreground. The latter might be an allusion to her alleged violent death. [1] In turn Dürer's innovation in the iconography of the suject may have inspired Lucas Cranach the Elder's own engraving from 1509 - presumably the first and most accomplished of his few works in this medium - which interpreted the episode in a natural idyll.[2] The pictorial type of the nude, that was developed further by Sebald Beham in an erotic form, [3] has been abandoned in Cranach's panel in the Wartburg from about 1525: here the female figure is dressed in elegant clothing and has assumed a portrait-like pose in the foreground, while the figure of the saint appears beneath the distant castle on the rocky outcrop, his size making him barely visible.

The composition, depiction of the landscape and the woman's clothes are similar to some of Cranach's paintings of the Virgin and his female portraits. [4] In addition there are references to the pictorial type of the half-length portrait with a landscape and grassy verge developed by the artist in the portraits of the Cuspinians (1502/03) and employed later in the depiction of St Barbara (about 1525), [5] as well as netherlandish and italian half-length depictions of saints. [6] The question as to whether the portrait-like character of the panel in Eisenach together with the care and quality in execution may indicate a courtly role portrait has been the subject of much controversial discussion in recent literature. [7] However, it is clear that the image, which is one of the few paintings of this subject, deploys different genre assembled quite innovatively by Cranach.

It is also possible to position the image within a Lutheran context: as such it is assumed to be the impulse for Luther's letter on the impossibitity of a life of celibacy, which was written in the same year the painting was created, 1525. The reformer also made use of the Chrysostomos-legend when in 1537 he wrote to the Mantuan council in disapproval of the sinful papal church.[8] As such beyond the thematic-iconographical level the reception of Cranach's depiction can in addition be located within the context of reformist church criticism.

[1] Schoch, Mende, Scherbaum 2001, 41 f.

[2 ]Jahn 1972, 199 f.; Exhib. Cat. Basel 1974, 593 f., No. 486; Exhib. Cat. London 2007, 122

[3] on the emblematic autonomy of the motif see: Wind 1937/38 and Schoch, Mende, Scherbaum 2001

[4] Friedländer, Rosenberg 1979, Nos. 89, 225, and 171-173

[5] Friedländer, Rosenberg 1979, Nos.. 6-7 and 165

[6] Exhib. Cat. Basel 1974, 163-166 and 184, No. 93

[7] Exhib. Cat. Basel 1974, 166; Exhib. Cat. Frankfurt 2007, 274

[8] Exhib. Cat. Basel 1974, 594; Schoch, Mande, Scherbaum 2001, 41 f. (with further reading)

[Exhib. Cat. Gotha/Kassel 2015, 226]