The exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, the painter and engraver Lucas Cranach, the greatest personality of the German Renaissance.

A friend of Luther and a fervent Protestant, Cranach was a court painter to the electorate princes of Saxony for fifty years and the head of a renowned workshop, serving leading figures from the worlds of politics, humanism and religion, of whom he made incisive, intense portraits.

A court artist, he developed a cultivated and measured style, with a refined and courteous elegance that becomes subtly sensual in the beautiful nudes. He tackled sacred and profane themes, humanistic and erotic subjects, completely independently of his contemporary Albrecht Dürer and the Italian Renaissance: another “Renaissance” represented by an innovative and seductive formal language.

The Galleria Borghese preserves one of his paintings, the Venus and Cupid Stealing Honeycomb. The German painter’s cold and sophisticated Venus uniquely contrasts the Italian Renaissance paintings in the collection, which meet a demand for a natural and physical likeness through drawing and colour, far from the figurative style of northern Europe.

Taking inspiration from this occasion, presenting Cranach’s painting in the setting of the Galleria Borghese means offering the public the visual contrast and comparison between the representation of light and natural space, the sculptural carnality of the figure, and a figurative choice tending towards an incorporeal abstraction and a refined virtuosity.

Cranach, however, did not ignore the artistic language of the Italian Renaissance. Here it is possible to highlight the various inspirations for his painting, a complex graft of Nordic figurative culture and the humanistic art that flourished in Italy.

Presenting to the public 45 of the most significant works by Lucas Cranach from the major European and American museums – some off-site for the first time – and ten woodcuts by the artist, engaging with the Borghese collection through a studied visual overlap, the museum aims at learning more about the artist and the problem of his relationship with Italian art of the time, striving to overcome conventional artistic concepts, in search of new balances.

Cranach. L’altro Rinascimento [Cranach. The Other Renaissance] is curated by Bernard Aikema and Anna Coliva,

The catalogue is published by 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE.