Lucas Cranach the Younger, 1545 - Nymph of the Spring - fine art print

Original artwork specifications by the museum's website (© Copyright - The Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

This small, astonishingly well preserved painting shows a nudewoman reclining on the grassy bank of a river, near a springthat issues from a rock formation. Looking toward the viewer, sheidentifies herself and offers a word of caution through the first-personLatin inscription at the upper right: “I, nymph of the sacredspring, am resting; do not disturb my sleep.” The scene’s open eroticismis heightened by the nymph’s sultry, half-closedeyes; the red tinge of her cheeks, buttocks, elbows, knees, and feet; the transparentveil that meanders from head to foot, as if to guide the viewer’sgaze along her body; and the bundled red dress, which evokes thethought of her disrobing. A bow and quiver hang in a nearby tree,signaling that the nymph belongs to the entourage of the huntressgoddess Diana. A green parrot perched on the bow and two rock partridgesin the grass probably serve as symbols of the Luxuria (lust)that is embodied by the nymph and called forth in the male viewer. The creatures’ unperturbed proximity to the nymph underscoresthe calm that reigns after the hunt. The two white animals in theimmediate foreground are old additions to the composition; theyare possibly rabbits, added by a later hand to further emphasize thenotion of Luxuria.The meticulously detailed landscape background is populatedby tiny humans and animals. To the right of the mill, oneperson walks along the riverbank while another kneels by the water.A rider drives three donkeys, loaded with sacks of grain, toward themill. A boater navigates the river. Farther back, beyond the walledcity, two deer graze in a grassy clearing, and persons on foot andon horseback follow trails into the forest. A castle set high upon abluff presides over the landscape.Like the Judgment of Paris and Venus with Cupid the HoneyThief, the Nymph of the Spring counts among the most popular mythological subjects treated by Lucas Cranach theElder and his workshop. The present panel, which is most probablyby Lucas Cranach the Younger, is one of at least seventeen versionsthat survive. They date from the mid-1510sto about 1550. In the two earliest examples, a panel dated 1518 in the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, and one of about 1515 – 20 in the JagdschlossGrunewald, Berlin, the spring (fons) is depicted as a man-madefountain basin, with the inscription (the nymph’s address to theviewer) painted as if carved into it. From about the mid-1520sonward, however, the nymph lies before a natural spring flowing from a rock,the inscription is no longer fashioned as a fictive carving, and a bowand quiver, partridges, and, frequently, stags appear as accessories.Authors have detected in this subject matter an ambivalencebetween the sensual allure of the nude figure and her admonitionnot to disturb her rest, which is comparable to the moralizing aspect of the Venus with Cupid the Honey Thief paintings. The Cranach nymphs are thus connected with thecourtly ideal of control of the emotions and with the Christian andhumanist concern for the restraint of carnal desire. In the case ofthe Museum’s picture, these ideas appear to be at play not only inthe iconography but also in the intimate viewing experience, for itssmall size and minute execution encourage the viewer to approachwithin just inches of the seductive nymph.The subject matter appears to have originated in a pseudoclassicalLatin epigram thought to have been composed by the Roman humanistGiovanni Antonio Campano before 1465. It reads,Huius nympha loci sacri custodia fontis / Dormio dum blandaesentio murmur aquae. / Parce meum quisquis tangis cavamarmora somnum / R umpere; sive bibas sive lavere tace. (I, thenymph of this sacred place, keeper of the spring, am sleepingand listening to the endearing murmur of the water. Take care,whoever approaches this marmoreal cave, not to disturb mysleep; whether you drink or bathe, keep silent!)The passage found its way into many contemporary compilationsand, its modern origin mostly forgotten, rapidly became one of themost widespread of all pseudoclassical epigrams.Evidence that it was current north of the Alps reaches backto the 1470s at the court of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary(r. 1458 – 90). In a compendium drawn up before 1486, MichaelFabricius Ferrarinus, prior of the Carmelite monastery in ReggioEmilia, remarked that the Huius nympha loci quatrain was to befound carved beneath the figure of a sleeping nymph on a fountain“on the banks of the Danube” (super rippam danuvii). For fifteenth-centuryItalian humanists like Ferrarinus, the Danube River was associated with the ancient Roman province of Pannonia, or modernHungary; thus, Ferrarinus’s reference may well have been toa fountain monument in Buda erected by Matthias Corvinus andsince lost. Further awareness of the epigram in northern Europeis documented in the literary remains of imperial poet laureateand humanist Conrad Celtis. Also, Albrecht Dürer, an acquaintanceof Celtis, reproduced the full passage in a drawing of 1514(KunsthistorischesMuseum, Vienna). The Cranach paintings ofthe theme reduce the epigram to a single-lineabridgment, “Fontisnympha sacri somnvm ne rvmpe qviesco,” which raises the questionof a variant textual or epigraphic source.It has been suggested that that LucasCranach the Elder knew of an actual sculpted fountain nymph “onthe banks of the Danube,” and that Cranach might have encountered Matthias Corvinus’s fountain firsthand on a trip to Buda about 1502 – 4, when he resided in Vienna, as suggested by a description written by the Hungarianhumanist Thomasus Jordanus, in which the fountain’s inscription isrecorded not as the usual four-lineepigram but instead as a coupletwhose first line is the same as the verse on Cranach’s paintings, which suggests that the monument described by Jordanus was Cranach’ssource. Some scholars have doubted the historical and epigraphical accuracyof Jordanus’s note, but nevertheless maintain the value of hisremarks as evidence of the fountain’s existence in Buda. Whereas the extent and manner of influence of the Buda fountainon Cranach is difficult to gauge, it is clear that the reclining posehe used for most of his nymphs derives from a woodcut publishedin Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) that shows an imaginary nymphean fountain. In the book illustrationand the majority of Cranach’s paintings, the nymph supportsher head with her right hand, rests her left hand on her left thigh,and crosses her left leg over her right. The bow and quiver, whichappear commonly in paintings after 1525, find a precedent in a 1510engraving by Giovanni Maria Pomedelli. That print, whichshows a reclining nymph in a landscape surrounded by animals inrepose (except for the retreating boar with an arrow in its rump), isinscribed Qvies (quietude) and thus emphasizes the notion of restafter the hunt found also in Cranach’s pictures. Other proposedsources of influence are less direct but nevertheless demonstrate agrowing interest in the reclining female nude in the years before thefirst appearance of Cranach’s fountain nymphs.The Nymph of the Spring has convincingly been attributed to Lucas Cranach theYounger and its high quality sets it apart from routineworkshop production. The folded wings of the serpent insigniaon the tree trunk confirm a date after 1537, when the Cranachsbegan using that form of the mark. The overall bright tonality, thegray undermodeling of the flesh, visible with the naked eye andinfrared imaging, the paleness of the flesh tone, and theexaggerated local reddening all speak in favor of an attribution toLucas the Younger. The dimensions of the Museum’s picture associateit with a group of small panels produced in the second halfof the 1540s that share a doll-like quality of the figures and a pronouncedrosiness in the faces. This group is also close to certain contemporarylarge-scale pictures that have been attributed to Lucas Cranach theYounger, such as Elijah and the Priests of Baal of 1545 (GemäldegalerieAlte Meister, Dresden) and Saint John the Baptist Preaching of 1549 (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig). The dates of thecomparative works suggest a likely range of about 1545 – 50 for theMuseum’s Nymph of the Spring, slightly earlier than the dating ofabout 1550. The composition of the Museum’s Nymph of the Spring served asthe basis for three copies. While those in the Gemäldegalerie AlteMeister, Kassel and a private collection were probablyproduced within the workshop, the one in the Staatliche KunsthalleKarlsruhe appears to be by a copyist of the late sixteenth or earlyseventeenth century.[2016; adapted from Waterman 2013]

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Background information on this artpiece painted by with the name Lucas Cranach the Younger

This over 470 year old artpiece was created by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Younger. The version of the work of art was painted with the size: 6 x 8 in (15,2 x 20,3 cm) and was painted on the medium oil on beech panel. The piece of art forms part of the art collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in New York City, New York, United States of America. With courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (licensed: public domain). : Robert Lehman Collection, 1975. The alignment is in landscape format with a side ratio of 4 : 3, which implies that the length is 33% longer than the width. Lucas Cranach the Younger was a male politician, engraver, painter, whose style can be classified as Northern Renaissance. The Northern Renaissance artist was born in the year 1515 in Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany and deceased at the age of 71 in 1586 in Weimar, Thuringia, Germany.

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