The Fountain of Youth

Human beings dream of immortality and eternal youth, of being able to leave behind their weary, frail bodies and to re-emerge fresh and rejuvenated. People used to think that the four elements would help them to attain eternal youth and they attributed to them magical, procreational and cleansing powers. After all, everyone has experienced how nature renews itself every spring, ripens during the summer,
bears fruit in autumn and dies in winter only to emerge anew the following spring. The belief was that the powers that young, continually procreating life generates could also help aged people attain new youth. Fire and water in particular were thought to have such magical properties. For example, the legend of the phoenix, the mythical bird who turns to ash and then rises again fresh and rejuvenated, fired human desire for such a transformation. This desire is expressed in a whole range of myths, legends and fairy tales. Far out in the wilderness, far from places of human habitation, there is a spring or a lake, so the legend goes, where the water has the power to wash away old age. Anyone who bathes in it emerges from the water rejuvenated. In Cranach’s time, this was a widespread legend with which everyone was familiar.
In the High Middle Ages, the legend of the fountain of youth was absorbed into literature. In the 15th century, the Nuremberg poet Hans Rosenplüt wrote a widely known poem on this subject. Two years after Cranach’s Fountain of Youth Hans Sachs also wrote a poem on the theme featuring motifs that recall Cranach’s depiction. Cranach’s painting is by no means the only visualisation of the theme, but it is the only large panel painting devoted to the subject that we know of. In graphic art, the depiction of a fountain of youth crops up quite often and also appears in wall paintings. The belief in the cleansing power of water is founded on the washing rituals that are practiced in many religions. Baptism, for example, is a ritual of washing away a person’s sins. Thomas Murner, the Alsatian humanist, described baptism as a fountain of youth for the soul in his Badenfahrt (Strasbourg 1514).
This idea also appeared in visual form. A painting by Jean Bellegambes in Lille shows a baptism stone filled with the blood of Christ. A crucifix rises out of it like the column in a fountain. The virtues, Caritas and Spes, are helping the believers into a bath that will wash away their sins.
Cranach’s Fountain of Youth, by contrast, is more secular. It lies far from the city whose towers are visible in the background. A rectangular basin with steps leading down to it is located between mountains and meadows. Women are bathing in it. They arrive along barren, stony paths from the infertile mountains whose bleakness symbolically alludes to the privations of old age. They are being wheeled along helplessly in carts or wagons or else carried on stretchers or on people’s backs. On
the rim of the basin, young women are helping them to undress. A doctor throws a last hopeless glance at his patient before she steps into the bath. The scene reveals a whole range of different characters. Some women climb into the basin and then walk through the water determinedly, others sit hesitantly on the edge and have to be talked into bathing or even pulled into the water. They enter the bath as decrepit old hags. But as soon as the women begin to walk through the water it unfolds its magical powers: their wrinkles become smooth, their grey skin becomes firm and rosy and they leave the basin again on the right as charming, girl-like young women. A gentleman receives them and brings them to a tent where they are dressed. Clad in new garments and jewellery they join in the dancing. The gentlemen entertain the women. They are invited to feast at a banqueting table. The assembled company spends the day merrymaking with dancing, feasting and love-making. Their joie de vivre finds expression in their merry surroundings. On the side of old age, there are craggy, stony mountains, but here, on the side of youth, the scene is of green meadows and plants bearing fruit in a serene garden of pleasure. The power that endows the women with new youthfulness comes from the water, and the figures on the fountain column tell us what kind of power this is: for it is Cupid, the god
of love, and Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who rule over the fountain and from whom the power of rejuvenation and beautification exudes. It is love that brings this about. Strikingly, only women are bathing in the pool. Only they are subjecting themselves to the magical transformation. The solution to this puzzle is offered by a contemporary, Rabelais. He tells us how Pantagruel discovers in the “realm of the quintessential” numerous other impossible ways to rejuvenate women – by melting them down or refounding them – so that they once again resemble 15- or 16-yearolds.
Asked whether old men are melted down too, he answers: no, because they are rejuvenated by spending time with young women. Cranach’s fountain of youth is thus a fountain of love. Cranach has reinterpreted the old theme ironically and retold it to comply with the taste of the princes at court, those who commissioned the painting, in other words. Wilhelm H.Köhler | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting – Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019