Word: cranachs
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...Cranach Was Hidden. Going from "castle to castle" between world wars, she restored some 500 works for fellow bluebloods. She learned how to smooth over chipped spots ("like filling a tooth"), repaint damaged hands and noses, replace frayed lining, spruce up dull paint with a coat of bright varnish. As she became more skilled, she repaired masterpieces by Rubens, Tiepolo and Velasquez. Once, working on a dark, somber painting by the 16th century Italian Jacopo Palma, she found a whole covey of saints and angels hiding under the grime. Another time, she was called in to restore an unusual Lucas...
...name Lucas Cranach generally calls to mind sexy mythological paintings, ornate altar pieces, and lively woodcuts satirizing the Roman Catholic Church. Cranach's delicate, pregnant-looking nudes are sly as cats, and inhabit gardens painted to look as cozy as quilts. His satiric woodcuts echo the attacks that his friend Martin Luther made on Rome...
...Cranach had another string to his bow: as one of Europe's best court painters, he had scores of portrait commissions from the 16th Century princes and princelings of northern Europe. Last week some of those early Protestant noblemen stared from the walls of a Manhattan gallery. Cranach's oil-on-paper portraits were intended merely as notes for more finished paintings, but they are shrewd, thorough notes...
Among the best is Cranach's sketch of Philip, Duke of Pomerania, a picture once attributed (along with several other Cranachs) to Albrecht Dürer, one of history's greatest draftsmen. Cranach dramatized details of character that a candid camera might have caught: the fierce brow, the thoughtful squint, the sad, confident mouth...
...Like Cranach, Titian had taken his pick in the Greek Pantheon, but had added a sumptuousness of his own. His Venus and the Lute Player made the goddess look more human than divine, for his brush managed to suggest the blood beneath the opalescent skin and to impart a warmth that no marble could match. Compared with Titian's, even such latter-day Technicolor Venuses as Lana Turner seemed somewhat anemic...