From Timothy Hyman's current TLS piece on Cranach:
The same wit shines out in Cranachıs most famous contribution to world art,
his almost laughable female nudes.
The catalogue traces their origins in humanist circles, in Dürer and in
works by Giorgione, Titian and Lorenzo di Credi, which Cranach may have
encountered in Italy.
But the synthetic being who first appears in the artistıs fifties, with her
protruding tummy and rubber thighs, is an utterly unclassical conception of
the human body.
Sometimes she is cast as a forest-aboriginal, in that imagery of a naked
Golden Age which usually signals as in Matisseıs ³Dance² the living hope
of future liberty. But often, whether she is named Eve or Diana or Salome,
Cranachıs Woman wears the same conniving expression, of sweetness and
cruelty commingled.
The marvellous Frankfurt ³Venus² (who currently lurks some seven foot high
in the tunnels of the London Underground) turns out to be a very small
picture; but she has a cosmic presence.
She stands on the curved rim of our world, spread out against the black
night, an immense dream-personification, perhaps not so much of Beauty, as
of Temptation.
Her gesture is enigmatic (is her final veil being held up, or is it about to
be discarded?) and her striptease, like Salomeıs, seems certain to be
followed by a beheading.
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