 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Man of Sorrows with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist ca. 1540 oil on panel Hamburger Kunsthalle |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Christ at the Column as Man of Sorrows 1515 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Eve ca. 1528-30 oil on panel Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Fall of Man ca. 1510 woodcut Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
-Kupferstichkabinett-Staatliche-Museen-zu-Berlin.jpg) |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Crucifixion ca. 1501 woodcut (unique impression) Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Crucifixion with the Converted Centurion 1536 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Risen Christ 1537-38 oil on panel Bildgalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder St Eustace ca. 1515-20 oil on panel (altarpiece fragment) Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
-Landesmuseum-Hannover.png) |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Martyrdom of the Seven Sons of St Felicitas ca. 1530-35 oil on panel (outer wings of altarpiece) Landesmuseum Hannover |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Younger Catherine, Princess of Brunswick-Grubenhagen ca. 1540-41 tempera on paper Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Younger Portrait of a Prince of Saxony ca. 1540 tempera on paper Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Younger Portrait of a Prince ca. 1540 tempera on paper Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Younger Portrait of a Woman ca. 1565 oil on panel Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach ca. 1511-12 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Portrait of a Man 1522 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
 |
| Lucas Cranach the Elder Joachim I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau 1532 oil on panel Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau |
The function of representation in cubist paintings is not to inform us about guitars and apples, nor to stimulate our tactile sensations. It is to narrow down the range of possible interpretations till we are forced to accept the flat pattern with all its tensions. Even nonobjective art derives some of its meaning from the habits and mental sets we acquired in learning to read representations. Indeed, we have seen that any three-dimensional shape on the canvas would be illegible or, which is the same, infinitely ambiguous, without some assumptions of probabilities that we must bring to it and test against it. The painter who wants to wean us from these assumptions has perhaps only one way open to him. He must try to prevent us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind by compelling us to switch over to that alternative which we have observed in the interpretation of drawings; he must make us read his brushmarks as traces of his gestures and actions. This, I take it, is what the "action painter" aims at. He wants to achieve an identification of the beholder with his Platonic frenzy of creation, or rather with his creation of a Platonic frenzy. It is quite consistent that these painters must counteract all semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space. But few of them appear to realize that they can drive into the desired identification only those who know how to apply the various traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces. If this game has a function in our society, it may be that it helps us to "humanize" the intricate and ugly shapes with which industrial civilization surrounds us.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)