Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Lucas Cranach the Elder
German; 16th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
89%
The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara. c1510. Oil on linen
The massing here is somehow off. Four figures clumped stiffly to the left — halved by a vertical halberd that's the scene's only straight solid thing — are thrust back and over by an arcing primary action (sword-swipe) which, reciprocally, they decenter and minimize. This seems in service of enframing Barbara, knelt right at the picture's edge. She herself is a mess of visual contradictions, the total mass of her pointing pyramidally up but every comprising triangle (folded legs, clasped hands, necklace, bosom) plunging towards the ground, whether left- or rightwards. Maybe this signals some kind of correspondence between the earthly and the transcendent, but more so it makes for a ganglion of shooting planes much more complex than the corpulent Teutonic formality of Cranach's modeling initially suggests. Still, it's a complexity constrained, hemmed-in by the half-rhombus made up of executioner and attendants. The landscape shifts and leans to accommodate the structure of these human actions. (2023)