LUCAS CRANACH
This same Archbishop Albrecht, whose features are also known to us from two engravings by Dürer and a painting by Grünewald, was one of the most generous patrons of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), whose busy workshops at Wittenberg supplied the whole north and east of Germany with portraits, altarpieces, historical and mythological pictures. Lucas Cranach was a follower of Grünewald, the great head of the Colmar school. Apart from his merit as a colourist and an excellent draughtsman, he attracts by the naïve grace of his nude figures and by the complete manner in which he reflects the taste of his time and country. But of the five little pictures that figure in the Louvre Catalogue under his name, not one is from his own hand. Indeed, the Venus in a Landscape (No. 2703) is the only one that may with a degree of safety be attributed to his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger, who carried on the management of the studio some years before his father’s death, and continued to imitate his style until his own death in 1586. The Venus bears the usual Cranach signature of a winged serpent and the date 1520. The same crest, with the date 1532, figures on the portrait of Johann Friedrich III., Elector of Saxony (No. 2704), who is known on one occasion to have given a wholesale order of sixty replicas of the same portrait to the Wittenberg master. It may be imagined that a commission of this nature would not be executed by the head of the studio, but left to his staff of assistants. The Fighting Savages (No. 2702a) and the two Portraits (Nos. 2703a and 2705) are, at the best, studio works.