Vienna's Museum of Art History and Lucas Cranach's “Adam and Eve” in Its Collection

Opening a new weekly column.

Today we shall visit the foremost art museum of Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History), whose holdings are made up of several royal collections: those of Archduke Leopold, Emperor Rudolf II and Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Italians and the Dutch are the most numerous here. There are so many Italian works in the collection that at one time a programme was even in operation to return to Italy part of the cultural heritage carried off to Vienna when the northern Italian lands formed part of Austria. Today it is precisely the paintings of the Italian schools of art that are most fully represented in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The second jewel of the collection is the Old Masters of the Netherlands and Flanders, from van Eyck and van der Weyden to Mabuse and Mor, from Rubens and Rembrandt to van Dyck and Frans Snyders, together with the largest collection of Bruegel the Elder in the world.

Among the museum's treasures are also works by the German painter Lucas Cranach, for example the Adam and Eve that I wanted to show today. Several museums around the world can boast a painting or diptych under that title. For Cranach, the nude was practically a production line. We are fortunate: in Saint Petersburg one may see one of Cranach's key "nude" works, Venus and Cupid. It is commonly held that many later paintings contain allusions precisely to this canvas. In 2011 the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris staged a large exhibition of the German Renaissance, in which an entire room was devoted to Cranach's bare flesh: there were nymphs, and as many as four pious Lucretias stabbing themselves with a knife out of shame, and almost all the versions of "Adam and Eve".

The much-in-demand biblical subject of the progenitors of mankind was not always realised in commissions for the Church. Most of the works were painted for private collections. The fashionable workshop of the artist in Wittenberg was famed not only for its name but for the sheer number of its works: Cranach's Adams and Eves hung in the alcoves of wealthy churches and in the boudoirs of palaces.

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