- Melancholy (1532, Lucas Cranach, the Elder: Oil on panel. 51 x 97 cm. Copenhaguen, Statens Museum for Kunst)
Lucas Cranach the Elder painted this troubling allegorical panel of melancholia in 1532 at the end of the era of gothic painting. A shrewd but withdrawn angel sits on dark cushion and whittles a long stick into a toy for nude children who are trying to push a large globe through a hoop (the globe may or may not fit). In the middle ground, a silky white spaniel sits on the window sill above a mated pair of partridges. Is one of the birds to become the dog’s dinner?
Beyond the window, the painting’s background offers a terrible spectacle: armed opponents kill one another in a craggy Saxon landscape of walled towns and hill castles. In the skies above the battle, wild pagan deities ride the storm. Astride boars, hounds, and rams, the grim deities relentlessly pursue their hunt with casual indifference to the bloodshed below.
The painting is symbolic of the collective destiny of humankind. The angel’s mien, the animals, and the dark background all suggest that, even with heavenly assistance, the new generation will not succeed at their serious game but are condemned to a circle of violence.
ferrebeekeeper 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 22, 2010 at 2:43 PM
byranne
what is the importance of this picture?? i need help!!
November 22, 2010 at 3:25 PM
Hieronymo
Cranach was the court painter to the Electors of Saxony and a personal friend to Martin Luther. I think he saw that a terrible religious/political storm was coming to engulf Germany–indeed all of continental Europe–within a generation. The painting is a dark allegory of the increasingly impossible affairs of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century (problems which ultimately culminated in the thirty years war).
However, like I said above, their are implications even broader than the affairs of Europe at the time. A Freudian interpreter could find sexual tensions. A Christian could find symbolism about our fallen world. It’s an ambiguous and beautiful painting which works on many levels.