Lucas Cranach the Elder

Cranach arrived in Wittenberg around 1505 as court painter to the Elector Frederick the Wise, but the painting workshop was never his only business. He became a Wittenberg town councilman for the first time in 1519 and acquired a printing press the same year. In 1520 he bought the town's apothecary privilege, and after 1523 he ran a bookshop as well. He held the mayoralty three times, in 1537 to 1538, 1540 to 1541 and 1543 to 1544. By the time of his death he was one of the richest men in the town he had helped to build.

This matters for reading the pictures, not just the biography. A workshop this commercially organised was built to produce volume, and the apothecary privilege, the printing press and the bookshop are evidence of the same organisational instinct that later let the painting workshop turn out dozens of near-identical Judiths and Venuses and, above all, portraits of Luther. The painting business was one arm of an enterprise, not a solitary artist's practice that happened to be busy.

In 1508 Frederick the Wise granted Cranach a coat of arms: a crowned serpent with upright bat wings holding a ring in its mouth. Cranach adopted the device as his workshop insignia from that year on, and it appears, painted small, on paintings across the rest of his working life and his sons' after him.

The serpent is not a signature in the sense a modern collector would expect. Technical research into the workshop's practice has established that only the most skilled painters in the shop were permitted to add the serpent to a finished picture, as a mark that the work met the shop's standard, not as a record of whose hand had painted it. A picture carrying the serpent is therefore a claim about quality control inside a large operation, not a claim that Lucas Cranach the Elder personally painted it. This is the single fact that makes attribution within the corpus as hard as it is, and it is documented, not a modern inference: the shop's own record-keeping shows the mark being awarded rather than simply applied.

Cranach's own 1531 self-portrait at Schloss Stolzenfels carries the serpent and the date 1531 at centre left, both later painted over and only recovered by X-ray and technical examination, which also ruled out the two standing doubts about the panel: that it had been cut down from a larger composition, and that it was a seventeenth-century copy. A different portrait, dated 1550 and inscribed as a self-portrait of Cranach at 77, hangs in the Uffizi; it has since been reattributed on stylistic grounds to his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger. Even a picture that calls itself a Cranach self-portrait, in an inscription, is not automatically one.

The scale is documented, not estimated. Workshop records from 1542, a period of high output, list both of Cranach's sons, several qualified journeymen, as many as six further workshop assistants and three apprentices, plus carpenters, woodcarvers and the specialist preparators (zubereiter) who applied ground and gilding before a painter ever touched a panel. Apprentices trained by copying and varying existing compositions before being judged ready to work more freely, and the workshop developed standardised procedures, including transferred and reused figure patterns, that let this scale of staff turn out pictures that read as uniformly 'Cranach'.

His two sons were central to it. Hans Cranach is first documented working in the shop and died suddenly while travelling in Italy, at Bologna, in 1537, a loss his father is recorded as having taken hard. Lucas Cranach the Younger is first mentioned as a member of the workshop in 1535, took on more responsibility after his brother's death, and formally succeeded his father as director of the Wittenberg workshop in 1544, nine years before the elder Cranach's own death. Because both sons trained in the family workshop from childhood and were, in the words of one biographer of the family, eager to emulate their father, scholars still struggle case by case to separate the hands, and many paintings are catalogued only as 'workshop of' one Cranach or the other for exactly this reason.

The standard catalogue raisonne, Max Friedlander and Jakob Rosenberg's Die Gemalde von Lucas Cranach, was first published in 1932 and last revised in 1979. It runs to 520 pages and lists roughly 1,000 panel paintings, of which only 452 are actually illustrated; the authors themselves judged an exhaustive comparison of every surviving panel 'superfluous'. The project that has since taken over the field, the Cranach Digital Archive, states plainly on its own site that the Friedlander-Rosenberg catalogue is now out of date.

The Cranach Digital Archive began in October 2009 as a partnership of nine founding museums, including the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, organised by the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf and the Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences, directed by Professor Gunnar Heydenreich and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2009 to 2018. Its own account of its progress states that the number of paintings that can now be associated with the Cranach workshop, meaning Lucas Cranach the Elder, his sons, and their assistants together, has 'almost doubled' since 1979. That figure is not the same question as how many paintings are accepted as being by the Elder's own hand, and the archive does not publish one clean number for that narrower question: by its own stated policy it records past and present attributions side by side rather than issuing a ruling, and it is explicitly a documentation platform, not an authenticating board. There is, in other words, no single current count of autograph Cranach the Elder paintings that this record can responsibly repeat as settled, and that gap is itself a finding rather than an oversight.

Cranach and Martin Luther were exact contemporaries in Wittenberg and became close, documented friends rather than a painter and a distant patron. Luther stood godfather to Cranach's daughter Anna in 1520. In 1525 Cranach acted as Luther's proxy suitor, presenting Luther's marriage proposal to the former nun Katharina von Bora, and Lucas and his wife Barbara were witnesses at the wedding itself; Cranach was in turn godfather to Luther and Katharina's first son, Johannes.

The professional partnership is equally documented. Cranach made his first portraits of Luther in 1520, before they had formally begun working together, reportedly on the recommendation of Albrecht Durer, who feared for Luther's safety after the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses and judged that a public image would help protect him. The first was an engraving showing Luther as an Augustinian monk; a second, more favourably received image showing him with an open Bible became his standard court portrait. Cranach and Luther worked together directly from 1521, illustrating Luther's translation of the New Testament, printed on Cranach's own press the following year; by 1534 the complete German Bible was published carrying 123 of Cranach's illustrations. Cranach and his workshop returned to Luther's face repeatedly across his career, from the 1520 monk portraits through the double portrait with Philipp Melanchthon of 1543, effectively a template that could be, and was, reproduced at volume: this is the same workshop system that produced the Judiths and the Venuses, turned toward a reformer's face instead of an Old Testament heroine.

Around 1529 Cranach produced the composition now known as Law and Gospel, or Law and Grace (Gesetz und Gnade): a divided panel that sets a man's fate under the Old Covenant against his fate under grace. On the Law side he is driven toward Hell by Death and a demon, flanked by Moses with his tablets, the Brazen Serpent, and the Fall of Man; on the Gospel side John the Baptist points him toward the crucified and risen Christ, whose blood, carried through the dove of the Holy Spirit, becomes what the composition's own programme calls the saving water of baptism. The two earliest versions, in Gotha and in the National Gallery in Prague, both date to 1529; the Prague panel unifies the two halves around a single man whose lower body points toward the Law and whose head and torso turn toward the Gospel, making the choice, rather than a static contrast, the subject of the picture.

Cranach almost certainly did not invent this theology alone. He is generally held, on the strength of his working relationship and friendship with Luther, to have drawn on Luther's own input in designing the composition, and Luther's 1522 explanation of the doctrine, that the Law shows a man his sin and his helplessness and the Gospel then offers him grace freely, maps directly onto the two halves of the panel. That collaboration is the working consensus among scholars of the image rather than a documented, signed commission, and it should be read at that grade: argued, not proven by a contract. Art historians disagree on how to read the finished image. Donald Ehresmann described the two halves as showing, starkly, the way to salvation against the way to damnation; Bonnie Noble has argued for a more dynamic reading in which the Law half is not simply wrong but is the necessary precondition that makes the need for grace legible, distinguishing Lutheran doctrine from a Catholic or Jewish law taken on its own terms. The composition was reworked repeatedly by Cranach and his workshop in different media, panel, woodcut and printed pamphlet illustration, and it supplied the visual template that Hans Holbein the Younger, Erhard Altdorfer and other printmakers drew on for their own versions of the same doctrine. It is, by any reasonable measure, the single most widely reproduced piece of Reformation doctrinal art, and it was made by the same workshop, using the same production methods, that turned out portraits of Luther and cabinet-scale nudes for the Saxon court.

Alongside the religious and doctrinal commissions, Cranach's workshop supplied the Wittenberg court and its humanist circle with a steady output of female subjects that were not devotional in the same sense: the Old Testament heroine Judith, shown after she has seduced and beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes with his own sword, and Venus, the classical goddess, painted nude and alone against a dark ground. The Metropolitan Museum's Judith, from about 1530, carries the workshop's own description of its purpose in miniature: the museum's catalogue entry notes that Judith is 'dressed to kill', in an elaborate contemporary court costume that would have appealed directly to Cranach's aristocratic patrons, and that the painter and his workshop produced several versions of this successful composition. The dressing of a Biblical heroine in current Saxon court fashion, rather than in any attempt at antique or Judean costume, is itself a choice about audience: this is a picture aimed at the people who would recognise the clothes.

The Venus subjects served a related but distinct function: a classical, moralised nude for the same humanist and aristocratic Wittenberg circle that wanted the Judiths, rather than a devotional image. A Venus now in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, dated 1532, is one of many surviving examples of the type: a single standing nude figure, thinly veiled by convention rather than modesty, against a plain dark background. As with the Judiths, the workshop repeated this composition many times over, which is precisely what later made a modern forgery of a 'new' Cranach Venus plausible enough to fool a purchaser paying millions for it; that case is covered below, under forgeries.

Three results, from three different decades of the market, show what a documented, exhibited, undisputed Cranach and a documented, exhibited, contested one both make at auction. On 8 July 2015 Sotheby's London sold La Bocca della Verita (The Mouth of Truth), a panel of about 1525 to 1528 from the collection of Countess Hardenberg at Schloss Neuhardenberg, estimated at GBP 6 to 8 million; it made a hammer price of GBP 8.2 million, reported at GBP 9.3 million (roughly EUR 12.1 million, and separately reported as USD 14.4 million on the day's exchange rate) once the buyer's premium was added, then a new auction record for the artist. Benjamin Spira, co-curator of a Cranach exhibition at the Schloss Friedenstein Gotha Foundation, described it at the time as more than double the previous record for one of Cranach's works, and noted that old masters of this quality very rarely reach the market at all.

On 19 April 2018 Christie's New York sold Cranach's Portrait of John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony, painted in the 1530s and depicting Cranach's own greatest patron and close friend. The picture had been looted from the Amsterdam banker and collector Fritz Gutmann after the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940; Gutmann and his wife Louise were arrested in 1943 and died the following year in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz respectively. Returned to the Gutmann heirs, with Christie's assistance, nearly eighty years later, the portrait was estimated at USD 1 to 2 million, hammered at USD 6.6 million after an intense bidding contest, and sold for USD 7.7 million with premium, seven times its pre-sale estimate.

In early July 2022 Christie's London sold Nymph of the Spring, an early sixteenth-century reclining nude, one of at least twelve known variations by Cranach on this same theme, formerly owned by Queen Christina of Sweden in the seventeenth century and never previously offered at auction. At least five telephone bidders competed for it, and it made GBP 9.4 million, described by the trade press as a new auction record for the artist; the reporting available for this page does not specify whether that figure is the hammer price or the price with premium included, and that gap is recorded rather than guessed at.

Cranach's popularity with German court and civic patrons in the sixteenth century made his pictures, and the pictures of his workshop, a natural target for Nazi-era acquisition and looting four centuries later: the Portrait of John Frederick I, taken from Fritz Gutmann in 1940 and only returned to his heirs in 2018, is one documented case among many. A separate, more heavily litigated case involving a different pair of Cranach panels, the Adam and Eve now split between two accession numbers at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and connected to the wartime Goudstikker gallery and to Hermann Goering personally, is already covered as its own record on this site, including the full ownership dispute and its resolution in United States federal court. That history is not repeated here in order to avoid duplicating a record this publication has already researched and published; this page instead treats Cranach's broad exposure to Nazi-era displacement as a pattern documented across more than one of his works, not a single case.

In 2013 Johann Kraftner, curator to Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, bought a panel called Venus with a Veil, dated 1531 and attributed to Cranach, from the London dealer Konrad Bernheimer for EUR 7 million. It entered the Princely Collections as a major rediscovery. In March 2016, while on exhibition in the south of France, it was seized by the investigating judge Aude Buresi as part of a criminal investigation into a suspected old masters forgery ring linked to the French dealer and collector Giuliano Ruffini, a investigation that had already implicated paintings passed off as works by Frans Hals, Parmigianino and Orazio Gentileschi and lent or authenticated in good faith by the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum and other major institutions.

A 213-page scientific study commissioned during the investigation found that the panel's chemical components were inconsistent with Cranach's known workshop materials, that its signature was not authentic, and that its craquelure and other signs of age were consistent with the panel having been artificially warmed to simulate centuries of ageing. The report's own conclusion, as reported by the Art Newspaper, was that 'the most probable hypothesis is that the work was executed in the manner of Cranach the Elder, by imitating his compositions, his palette, his touch and his time period'. Other scholars and art historians who examined the case are reported to have since agreed that the panel is a modern forgery.

The investigation identified a local Italian painter, Lino Frongia, working near Reggio Emilia, as the suspected forger, and named Ruffini as the alleged organiser of the wider trafficking ring; a Bologna court declined to order Frongia's arrest, while Italy's Supreme Court validated an arrest warrant against Ruffini, who has denied the allegations against him. On 15 April 2021 the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that the investigating judge had exhausted the technical examinations available and ordered Venus with a Veil returned to the Prince of Liechtenstein, finding that continued confiscation was no longer justified and would not obstruct the wider investigation. The prince's own curator, Kraftner, has continued to maintain that the attribution to Cranach is genuine. What happened to the case and the painting after that 2021 ruling was not established in the sources consulted for this page and is recorded as unresolved below.

The Cranach Digital Archive remains an active, growing research resource rather than a closed catalogue, adding technical documentation, X-radiographs and infrared reflectograms from partner museums on an ongoing basis; it is the closest thing the field has to a live authority, without itself claiming to be one. On the conservation side, the Norton Simon Museum's Adam and Eve panels, already the subject of a separate record on this site, underwent a comprehensive conservation treatment at the Getty Center in Los Angeles between 2021 and 2023, and technical study of the two panels has established that both were cut from the same tree, physical evidence that they were conceived and made as a pair rather than assembled from separate stock later.