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Caritas (Charity)
Historical Context
Charity from 1535 at the Nivaagaard Museum shows Lucas Cranach the Elder painting virtue allegory. Cranach, court painter to the Electors of Saxony, was a prolific artist who combined Northern Renaissance detail with the intellectual demands of the Reformation. Cranach's repeated treatments of Caritas reveal his ambiguous relationship with the female nude, simultaneously celebrating virtue and exploiting the subject's license to depict sensuous female flesh.
Technical Analysis
The allegorical figure is rendered with Cranach's characteristic linear precision and decorative elegance.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the nursing infant in the foreground — the lactating Caritas figure was one of Cranach's ways of combining the sanctioned subject of Christian virtue with the display of the female body.
- ◆Look at the decorative quality of the composition: Cranach transforms the allegorical subject into an elegant arrangement of pale flesh and animated child figures.
- ◆Observe the warm, muted palette that distinguishes this devotional allegory from the more vivid coloring of his secular and mythological works.
- ◆The figure type is identical to Cranach's other female subjects — the same idealized face and pale elongated form appears whether the subject is sacred virtue or classical mythology.
