Lucas Cranach

An affordable guide to the main themes and motifs of this much-loved genius of the Northern Renaissance

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) created around 500 works during his lifetime. With his portraits of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton, and in his position as court painter to Frederick the Wise, Cranach quickly became one of the most sought-after painters of the Reformation. At the same time, Cranach was the first to translate the Italian Renaissance tradition of the life-size nude into art north of the Alps; his lascivious, barely veiled depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, bears witness to this.
On the occasion of the epochal Cranach exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Austrian novelist Teresa Präauer explores the work of this busy prince of painters from A to Z. She focuses both on Cranach's art and on the society that surrounded him, the subjects he painted and the events that shaped his development.