Lucas Cranach the Elder

Lucas Cranach the Elder, painter, printmaker, politician, and confidante of the Electors of Saxony, is famously credited with inventing pictorial vocabulary suited to the theological and social changes catalyzed by the Lutheran Reformation. Approximately 1,000 images from Cranach and his enormous workshop survive. Cranach spent most of his professional life in the city of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther was professor of theology at the new university. In the course of Luther’s attempts to reform the Catholic Church starting in 1517, the artist supported the theologian personally and professionally by inventing new types of pictures with propagandistic or pedagogical rather than devotional functions. To suit the new faith, Cranach invented the quintessential Lutheran subject, Law and Gospel, which mapped out the principles of Lutheran salvation by faith alone. This subject, first painted in 1529, became the basis for subsequent Lutheran imagery by Cranach as well as other artists. Cranach’s most famous Lutheran paintings include the monumental altarpieces in Schneeberg (1539), Wittenberg (1547), and Weimar (1553–1555). Cranach and his son Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–1586) found a niche for Lutheran patrons by painting epitaphs. Before going to Wittenberg to become court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise, Cranach, who is named for his Franconian home town of Kronach, served the intellectual elite in Vienna, painting what are considered two of his most accomplished paintings, a pair of portraits of the young professor Johannes Cuspinian and his wife Anna, c. 1502–1503. Compared with his later work, produced in a factory-like workshop with assistants, these early works are some of his most beautiful. Despite his association with Luther, Cranach also continued to serve other patrons, including powerful members of the Catholic clergy, such as Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. He also produced theologically neutral pictures that were likely acceptable to believers of different confessions, for instance Madonna panels that emphasize the Virgin’s humanity rather than her role as a Catholic intercessor. In his capacity as painter to Electors Frederick the Wise, John the Constant, and John Frederick the Magnanimous, Cranach’s workshop provided mythological subjects such as Venus and Cupid, legendary subjects such as the Suicide of Lucretia, and allegorical paintings of Melancholia. Though scholars have observed a decreased quality of Cranach’s art as his workshop grew and the role of assistants increased, the efficiency of his workshop and the scale of production represented a calculated risk for this man, whose art propelled him to power and wealth.

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