Beguiling mix

Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play

Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant, elongated and slightly heraldic full-length portraits, or glimmering erotic nudes. There’s something very individual and instantly recognisable about his images, an aura of self-containment which is based on a decorative unity which looks back to Gothic art. This is balanced by the new naturalism of the German Renaissance. Cranach employed landscape elements (in the wake of Dürer) in his portraits and religious pictures as a means of adding poignancy and expression to his compositions. His particular mix of old and new is striking, and, at its best, deeply beguiling.