St Eustace
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553)
1515/20
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Lucas Cranach was both one of the most distinctive and one of the most distinguished of all German renaissance painters. He was a master in all the major genres of his time – namely religious art, mythology, and portraiture – and was at the same time a remarkably observant and evocative painter of landscape and of animals. It is generally agreed that Cranach’s later productions became increasingly formulaic, but his early work is both dazzlingly original and brilliantly executed.
Both Saint Eustace and Saint Hubert share what is in essence the same legend, but the former seems to have rather more popular, and is therefore in all probability the subject of this panel, as also of a celebrated and masterly engraving by Cranach’s almost exact contemporary, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Indeed, such was the fame of Dürer’s image that Cranach must have taken a conscious decision not to follow its compositional arrangement too slavishly.
In the 'Golden Legend', a medieval compilation of religious stories, it is related that Eustace was a Roman soldier and a pagan. Out hunting one day, he encountered a stag with Christ Crucified between its antlers, which spoke to him with the voice of the creature and said – echoing the words addressed to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus – ‘Why do you persecute me?’. He was instantly converted. The extraordinarily narrow vertical format of Cranach’s panel may suggest that it was designed with a very specific location in mind, but it also allows him to illustrate the text’s emphasis on the fact that the stag fled to a mountain-top. Neither the romantic distances of the landscape nor the playful charm of the various animals, and in particular the five hunting-dogs who surround their master, distract attention from the bowed and awestruck devotion of the saint, who is dressed in the very height of fashion.
- Material/technique
- oil on panel
- Measurements
- 87 × 33 cm
- Acquisition
- acquired in 1819 (?) by Prince Johann I von Liechtenstein
- Artists/makers/authors
- Lucas Cranach the Elder
- Inventory number
- GE 1036
- Provenance
- Acquired in 1819 by Prince Johann I von Liechtenstein, possibly in 1819 by Count Kolowrat, Prague.
- Iconography
- St. Eustace
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