LUCAS CRANACH I (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)
LUCAS CRANACH I (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)
LUCAS CRANACH I (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)
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Centuries of Taste: Legacy of a Private Collection
LUCAS CRANACH I (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)

Hercules and Omphale

Details
LUCAS CRANACH I (KRONACH 1472-1553 WEIMAR)
Hercules and Omphale
signed with the artist's serpent device and dated '1532' (upper center) and inscribed 'HERCVLEIS MANIBVS DANT LYDAE PENSA PVELLAE / IMPERIVM DOMINAE FERT DEVS ILLE SVAE / SIC ECIAM INGENTES ANIMOS INSANA VOLVPTAS / ET DOMITO MOLLIS PECTORE ERANGIT AMOR' (upper center)
oil on panel, transferred to canvas
32 ¾ x 48 ¼ in. (83.3 x 122.3 cm.)
Provenance
with Matthiesen Gallery, Berlin, by 1931.
(Possibly) Wendlinger, Berlin.
Osborn Kling (1874-1953), Stockholm, by 1932.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 24 March 1965, lot 43, where acquired by the following,
with Xaver Scheidwimmer, Munich, by 1966.
with Bernheimer Fine Old Masters, Munich, where acquired in 2000 by the present owner.
Literature
M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, Die Gemälde von Lucas Cranach, Berlin, 1932, p. 70, no. 223, illustration switched with no. 224.
Die Weltkunst, XXXVI, Munich, 1 April 1964, cover.
W. Schade, Die Malerfamilie Cranach, Dresden, 1974, p. 463, no. 177.
D. Koepplin and T. Falk, Lukas Cranach, I, Basel, 1974, pp. 245-246, under nos. 144 and 145.
M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, Ithaca, 1978, p. 123, no. 272.
C. Grimm, ed., Lucas Cranach. Ein Maler-Unternehmer aus Franken, exhibition catalogue, Augsburg, 1994, p. 361, under no. 188 (e).
C. Zilka, Exorcising our demons: magic, witchcraft, and visual culture in early modern Europe, Leiden, 2002, p. 362, fig. 56.
G. Baumbach, `“SIC ECIAM INGENTES ANIMOS INSANA VOLVPTAS" - Die Herkules-und-Omphale-Darstellungen der Cranach-Werkstatt und ein Gemälde Lucas Cranachs d.J. für Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg’, in A. Tacke, ed., "... wir wollen der Liebe Raum geben": Konkubinate geistlicher und weltlicher Fürsten um 1500, Göttingen, 2006, p. 391.
J. Howard, Cranach, Colnaghi, ed., London, 2009, p. 8, fig. 6.
R. Rowland, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War of Terror, New York, 2017, p. 114.
K.A.E. Enenkel, Theatre of sexual attraction and psychological destruction: the myth of Hercules and Omphale in the visual arts, 1500-1800, Leiden, 2025, pp. 68-70, fig. 1A.

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Lot Essay

Both provocative and boundary-pushing, Lucas Cranach’s painted explorations of the story of Hercules and Omphale are among the most celebrated works in his oeuvre. Between 1531 and 1537, the artist and his workshop painted at least 35 versions of this episode from the Herculean legend, each of which varies in the position and number of its figures as well as in the attitudes of its protagonists. Executed on an imposing scale, the present painting is one of Cranach’s earliest and most compelling treatments of the subject.

The story of Hercules and Omphale (sometimes conflated with Iole) is recounted in several ancient texts, most notably Apollodorus (The Library 2.6:3) and Ovid (Fasti 2:303-358). These sources relate how, to atone for murdering his friend Iphitus in a fit of madness, Hercules was sold as a slave to Omphale, the Queen of Lydia, under whom he would serve for three years. Ovid elaborates that Omphale delighted in dressing the demigod in her clothing and jewelry, while she herself took to carrying his club and wearing his Nemean lion skin. While these ancient sources were known to Europe’s most erudite circles, as Karl Enenkel has shown (op. cit. p. 33 ff.), Cranach and his contemporaries would most likely have encountered the myth through its much more detailed retelling in Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (`On Famous Women'). Composed 1360-1374, Boccaccio’s book enjoyed considerable popularity in Germany a century later thanks to the publication of a free translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel (1412-1482) in the 1470s. Boccaccio’s Iole seeks to punish Hercules for the death of her father, seducing and deceiving him with false love. In this way, the poet explains, she effectively steals his victories from him, dressing him in her clothes and inspiring him to engage in humiliating `feminine' activities such as spinning wool.

In line with Boccaccio’s description, Cranach’s Hercules has been driven mad with unbridled lust, shamelessly grasping at his captors while holding a giant distaff, which comically has replaced his mighty club. The smitten demigod has already made advances toward one of Omphale’s maidens, as suggested by her disheveled hair. She smirks down at him as she ties a starched linen bonnet around his head, imagery which Enekel has shown to have been taken directly from Steinhöwel’s translation (loc. cit.). Her white hat, adorned with a bejeweled hat badge, was presumably knocked from her head during their encounter and has now been recovered by the maiden at left, who smiles as Hercules grabs at her breast. Omphale stands at right, wearing a green overcoat and a white bonnet with gold netting. Underscoring their topsy-turvy power dynamic, she takes hold of Hercules’s distaff, a gesture replete with erotic symbolism.

To Cranach’s audience, this role-reversal would have been viewed as scandalous. The moral condemnation of Hercules’s behavior is made explicit by the painting’s inscription:

HERCULES MANIBUS DANT LYDAE PENSA PUELLAE
IMPERIUM DOMINAE FERT DEUS ILLE SUAE
SIC ECIAM INGENTES ANIMOS INSANA VOLUPTAS
ET DOMITO MOLLIS PECTORE ERANGIT [sic] AMOR

“The Lydian maidens give spinning wool to Herculean hands
That god bears the authority of his mistress
Thus do crazed lust and soft love crush even great spirits
Once their heart has been conquered.”

Cranach’s painting was thus intended to function as a warning to his powerful male patrons that even the strongest of men must be wary of flattery, lust and deceit. The artist dressed all four of his figures in fashionable clothing of the 16th-century Saxon court to ensure that his viewers would recognize themselves in his painting. Hercules’s hulking figure is garbed in a black slashed doublet with wide sleeves over a pleated shirt and slashed hose. The maidens in turn wear extravagant red velvet dresses with low-cut bodices adorned with decorative designs. An array of elegant headwear completes their attire, including silk berets, transparent veils, and hairnets studded with pearls. Similar outfits are found in many of Cranach’s paintings, including his idealized portraits of beautiful women of the Saxon court (often thought to be disguised portraits).

At the time Cranach created these compositions, the roles of men and women in society were fiercely debated throughout Europe. In Germany, this led to the popularization of a literary and artistic genre known as the Weibermacht (Power of Women). These works predominantly emphasized the dangers of women, particularly their ability to render men powerless through Weiberlist (Women’s Guile). This theme became a mainstay of Cranach and his workshop’s output and can be seen in his numerous paintings of Samson and Delilah, Judith and Holofernes, Salome with the Head of the Baptist, Aristotle and Phyllis, The Judgement of Paris, David and Bathsheba, Lot Seduced by his Daughters, and the Ill-Matched Couple.

For Martin Luther (1483-1546), Cranach’s close friend, the myth of Hercules and Omphale was a prime illustration of the dangers of Weibermacht. Indeed, the Reformer’s retelling of the story, which appears in his interpretation of Psalm 101 (composed in 1533⁄34 and dedicated to the young Elector Johann Friedrich), could function as a description of our painting, and undoubtedly reflects the prevailing understanding of this theme by Cranach and his patrons. Luther writes:

The pagans say of their Hercules (who was their David) that at the end of his life he allowed himself to be made a fool of by women. One put a veil on him, while another gave him her skirt and put a spindle into his hand. And he had to spin because of his great love. […] Poets and intelligent people, however, have depicted the following in art and refined words: when a brave leader or man cannot be overcome by any outrageous monster and when he has conquered all enemies around him (as Hercules did), in the end he cannot overcome the house devil, the domestic enemy. That darling lady and beautiful queen Omphale with her beautiful face and smooth tongue placed the veil on her dear Hercules and ordered him to spin. There the lofty conqueror sits, he who tore all the lions apart, who captured the hound of hell, who killed the centaurs and the Lapiths, who strangled dragons, and performed whatever other miracles they write about him. There he sits (I say) and allows his club to fall to the floor, taking the spindle in his hand, and his beautiful Omphale threatens him with the rod when he doesn’t spin right. This is how the poets have depicted the beautiful little cat named `Fawning,' as she makes a fool of the lords and masters at court and commands them to do whatever she wants to have done. But she has such a beautiful figure and such lovely speech that dear Hercules thinks that she is the angel of God, and that he himself is not worthy to have such a beautiful woman as Omphale, and he becomes her willing, subordinate servant.” (quoted in C.P.E. Springer, Luther’s Aesop, 2011, n.p.)

One of Cranach’s earliest and perhaps even the prime version of this composition might be the painting mentioned by the Wittenberg humanist and poet Phillip Engelbrecht (c. 1490-1528) in a Latin wedding song / Epithalamium that he composed in 1513 for the second marriage of Duke John the Steadfast, Elector of Saxony (1468-1532), to Margaret of Anhalt-Köthen (1494-1521) at Torgau Castle (published in 1514 by Johann Gronenberg in Wittenberg; G. Baumbach, op. cit., p. 370). Engelbrecht describes the work in the context of paintings and other decorations that Cranach created for the Duke as decorations for the bridal chamber, including an Apollo and Marsyas, the Idolatry of Solomon and a Lucretia: `Unter den Mäonischen [lydiaschen] Mädchen soll er einst gesessen haben und hier sitzt er auch, von Liebe gebrochen; er, der einst das Himmelsgewölbe trug, fürchtet, mit der Weiberhaube bekleidet, die Peitsche der Omphale' (`He is said to have once sat among the Maeonian Lydian girls and here he sits, broken by love; he, who once carried the vault of heaven, with the woman’s bonnet, now fears the whip of Omphale'; ibid.). These images, all of which highlight the Weibermacht, were intended to instruct the Duke and his new wife, warning them against the dangers of deviating from proper behavior and the period’s prescribed gender roles.

Given the subject’s 16th-century significance, it is thus unsurprising that another of Cranach’s great patrons, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490-1545), owned one of the artist’s finest treatments of Hercules and Omphale. That painting, now in Copenhagen (SMK - National Gallery of Denmark; fig. 1) bears the cardinal’s coat of arms and is dated 1535. Ambitious, intelligent and attuned to the humanist debates of his day, Albrecht was archbishop of Mainz and a fierce rival of Luther. He was unmarried, but certainly did not live a chaste life, and probably appreciated Cranach’s painting as a titillating reminder of the perils of straying far from his religious vows.

Any remaining doubts about the intended meaning of Cranach’s painting are allayed by the presence of the four dead partridges, which hang on the wall above Hercules’s head. Traditional symbols of lust, they are described as such in the Physiologus. Like Hercules, they are here understood to be the hunted victims of Omphale and her maidens, and are a warning of the consequences of an unbridled libido. These exact birds are taken from a c. 1530-32 drawing in the Staalische Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett (inv. no. C 1193; fig. 2), and recur in several of Cranach’s depictions of this subject. Additional partridges populate the backgrounds of other Weibermacht paintings from the Cranach workshop, such as his Samson and Delilahs and reclining nymphs.

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