The Virgin with Child with a Bunch of Grapes

'The Venus in St Petersburg from 1509 (No. 21) is a very similar in style.'

[Friedländer, Rosenberg 1932, 35, No. 29]

Cranach’s religious paintings were extremely well received in his day. This was undoubtedly due in part to certain characteristic features that are to be found in this Virgin and Child, which is generally dated to the first decade of the 16th century. The Virgin’s face, which is softly outlined and modelled, recalls Leonardo’s technique of sfumato. Such features, which made Cranach’s figures particularly sweet and gentle, are to be found in his work of around 1509 and 1510 following a trip to the Low Countries during which he may have had the chance to study Italian art at the court of Margaret of Austria. In addition, a similar approach to volume is to be found in two important works of this period: Salome, in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Kronach, and Venus and Cupid in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg. The present panel has been compared to those two works with regard to its date. Despite the softness evident in the two figures, whose heads are crowned with delicate, almost invisible, glowing haloes, the face of the Infant Christ is less pleasing with regard to its features and handling than Mary’s beautiful, rounded countenance.

The present panel has a landscape background, an element that was always crucial in Cranach’s compositions from the outset of his career and which contained elements that would subsequently be developed by the Danube School artists. This landscape, depicted from a high viewpoint, is organized around a large expanse of woodland that terminates in a chain of mountains painted in striking tones of blue, which leads the eye into the distance. The fortress on the top of the mountain on the right and the pine tree on the left are recurring motifs in Cranach’s compositions and are to be found in his Virgin and Child groups of around 1518. Lübbeke drew attention to the particular treatment that the artist gave to both the figures and the landscape in the present panel. In the landscape Cranach included the most minute details on a tiny scale such as the delicate branches of the trees, the shrubs and the fortress on the right. We can also make out a tiny figure who has been identified as Saint Joseph climbing up the steep path to the fortress. The precision in the depiction of the background contrasts with the brushwork and sense of monumentality of the foreground, occupied by the two figures. They are imbued with a sense of melancholy which is expressed in the Virgin’s gaze and in the Infant Christ’s self-absorption.

The fact that the composition includes a bunch of grapes held by the Virgin and which the Christ Child is eating has suggested a reference to the Eucharist and to Christ’s future role as Redeemer. The panel is signed with the winged serpent on the ledge on the left. Cranach derived this element from the coat-of-arms granted to him by the Elector of Saxony in 1508. On the death of his son Hans the artist modified the wings.

[Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, revised 2012]