Leseprobe

127 The German School The collection of the German school of painting unites disparate painters often only with the German language in common. From Bohemia, Austria, Holland, France, or Switzerland, they all spent active periods in Germany or the German-speaking world. Unlike in other schools, especially the Italian, our German collection’s strength is less due to Augustus the Strong or his son King August III’s collecting activities, as many of the German panels had hung in the Saxon Kunstkammer since the late 16th or 17th century, before Dresden’s Augustan age. The collection starts with altarpieces from c. 1500, still rooted in the late medieval tradition, with Albrecht Dürer’s devotional pic­ tures thereafter marking the dawn of the new Renaissance style. From 1505 on, Lucas Cranach the Elder created an array of pictures, secular and ecclesiastical, in Wittenberg. With 58 panels, the Ge­ mäldegalerie boasts the largest Cranach collection in the world. In a reflection of the humanist ideas of antiquity and the Italian Renais­ sance, artists north of the Alps made haunting portraits that probed the subject’s interiority. The 16th century saw Mannerist touches start to appear in German painting, in the unusual colour treatment of natural forms and figures set in tense poses, and soon this figure style would dominate art at the many German princely courts. Caravaggio’s tenebrism had a seminal influence on Baroque painting in the 17th century, also in the north. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), many artists were forced to move their workshops to less war-ravaged regions, such as Italy or the Low Countries, and were inspired by those styles and practices. When the picture gallery in the royal mews opened in 1748 and King August III converted to Roman Catholicism, German painters once again received commissions for biblical scenes and images of the Virgin and saints. But they also treated the pomp and ceremony of the Saxon court and, increasingly, the scenery around Dresden. In the last third of the 18th century, new accessions of works by then-living artists showed classical mythology scenes, natural land­ scapes, and architecture. Intense works of portraiture character­ ized the Enlightenment age and pointed to 19th-century art. | re