Recap: The complex world of Lucas Cranach the Elder., Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New Yorker, is it just me, or have the Old Masters got younger lately? If so, it may be because present anxieties about the state and the fate of Western civilization echo past ones, when artists were energized around big issues, such as clashes of modernizing and medievalist mind-sets, which may never have been completely settled. Consider a rousing retrospective of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), which has opened at the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt, and will travel in the spring to the Royal Academy, in London.

There are contemporary tangs to this most bewildering paragon of a cohort which included the Leonardoesque Albrecht Dürer and the dazzling Hans Holbein the Younger. Cranach was a sometime religious revolutionary and a full-time entrepreneur. In his work, early strains of late-Gothic blood and guts give way first to courtly high styles, then to pictorial propagandizing for the new theology of his friend Martin Luther—even as, strangely, Cranach continued to oblige Roman Catholic clients. (Those were intricate times.) He rivalled Dürer and Holbein in portraiture, and he developed product lines of delirious erotica and hilarious genre scenes. Buyers seemingly couldn’t get enough of his “ill-matched couples”: fatuous geezers or crones acuddle with gold-digging babes or young bucks.

With a prolific workshop, so well coached that its authorship can be hard to distinguish from his own, and with businesses in real estate, publishing, and a liquor-licensed pharmacy, Cranach became one of the richest men in the Lutheran stronghold of Saxony. He was three times the mayor of Wittenberg. As an artist, he siphoned his era’s chaotic energies into wonderments of style. His re-visionings of humanity are philosophically resonant and lots of fun.

Cranach was born the son of a painter, in Kronach, in Upper Franconia. Almost nothing else is known of him until around 1500, when, in his late twenties, he showed up in Vienna as a convulsively expressionistic painter of gnarled, gory Crucifixions, often with one of the flanking thieves ingeniously pretzeled on a tree-trunk cross, and with dogs gnawing human remains below. He was an originator of what came to be called the Danube school, a painting movement influenced by humanist intellectuals, which vivified religious motifs with realistic landscape settings and raking light.

Eloquent primary colors in Cranach’s early work bespeak exposure to Central Italian paintings by Perugino and perhaps by Perugino’s likely student the young Raphael. (It’s not known whether Cranach visited Italy, but a trip north, in 1508, brought him up to date with Netherlandish innovations.) In 1505, he was hired as the court painter and decorator to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Cranach tamed his drawing, though not his color, in such works as a breathtaking “Beheading of St. Catherine” (1515), in which the thuggish executioner, prior to decapitating the elegant saint, seems tenderly fascinated by the locks of hair he lifts from her neck. She looks scared. Cranach made radiantly personable portraits of court figures and sweet nudes—both Biblical (Eve) and mythological (Venus, Diana, the Three Graces)—featuring girlish, impossibly long-waisted bodies and generic expressions whose repetition somehow doesn’t spoil the freshness of each image. The nudes’ appeal to prurient gazes is patent in depictions of the noble Roman suicide Lucretia, made cruelly delectable by the pointy dagger poised to enter her pale flesh.