Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German painter, born in Kronach in 1472, who died in Weimar in 1553. From 1505 he was court painter to the electors of Saxony in Wittenberg, where he painted Martin Luther again and again, and also the slender, veiled Venuses that now hang in museums on both sides of the Atlantic.
He signed his work with a winged serpent, the mark of a workshop that kept turning out pictures for some eighty years.
The painter who gave the Reformation its face also painted Venus wrapped in a transparent veil, and he did both in the same small Saxon town, for the same patrons, in the same years.
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Wittenberg was where Martin Luther lived and taught, and Cranach was his friend and neighbour. In 1520 he made the first portrait of the monk who was defying Rome, in 1522 he illustrated the first part of Luther's German Bible, and in 1528 he painted the face that Protestant Europe would come to know. Few people did more to show Europe what Luther looked like.
Yet the same workshop was busy with other orders. It painted Venus clasping a transparent veil, with a Latin verse on a tree warning that pleasure is brief and pain lasts. It painted Albrecht of Brandenburg, the cardinal who stood against Luther, as Saint Jerome in his study. Cranach had joined the Reformation, and he kept accepting commissions from Catholic patrons.
Cranach left no account of how he squared this. Neither the museum catalogues nor the biographies quote a letter in which he explains himself. What survives is the work, and a small winged serpent that he stamped on all of it.
What You'll Discover
Why a winged serpent signs his work.
What a painter also sold in Wittenberg.
Who stood beside Luther at his wedding.
What Cupid pays for his honey.
Which enemy of Luther sat for him.
What changed in the serpent after 1537.