The Warhol of the Renaissance: Lucas Cranach, the Elder

Working during the Renaissance, Lucas Cranach, the Elder, spread the ideas of the Reformation across Germany. In his many portraits of Martin Luther, he created the image of a modest man who achieved significance for his beliefs. The portraits quickly spread, shaping the public image of the reformer. Cranach and Luther met in Wittenberg, where Cranach worked as a painter at Frederick III's court.

In 1521, Elector Frederick the Wise ordered Luther to come to the Wartburg castle in the vicinity of Eisenach in an attempt to protect him from attacks. Disguised as the squire Jörg, he grew a beard. In hiding, Luther translated the New Testament into German. Witnessing the different phases of the project, Cranach helped shape Luther's public image.

The fall of man in paradise: Adam and Eve are depicted standing naked in the Garden of Eden. Cranach painted the moment in which Adam was seduced by a snake winding down from a tree in an attempt to persuade Eve to pass on the apple of knowledge to Adam. The painting dates back to 1531.

Is he ridiculing her? Is he trying to instruct her? Lucas Cranach, the Elder, loved to portray unequal couples. At times, a youthful beauty is caressing the beard of an old geezer, or a toothless aged woman is smiling at her young lover. Some of Cranach's humorous, or even cynical, paintings resemble a farce.

In addition to portraits, Cranach also produced numerous nudes that were in high demand, making him rich and famous. There's Venus with or without Amor, a disgraced and suicidal Lucretia, nude nymphs cuddling up to muscular gigolos in fountains, and naive visions of women trying to assuage angry hunters.

In an attempt to display people as they really were, Lucas Cranach, the Elder, distanced himself from idealized templates as propagated in church paintings. He scrutinized his models very thoroughly in order to depict their characteristics. The artist portrayed scholars and bourgeois women alike.

As Lucas Cranach produced entire series of his chosen subjects, he created templates that could be copied in his studio. He also worked with schematized models, enabling him to produce a particular model in various sizes, including the one shown here representing Saint Jerome. This procedure proved to be highly efficient and greatly helped the distribution of his paintings.

For the first time ever, the painting "Madonna with Child" (1510) is now being shown in Germany. For a long time, the famous work was believed to have been lost, but it turned out that during World War II, a priest in what is now Wrocław, Poland, had substituted the original with a copy in an attempt to protect it from potential war damage. The original resurfaced in 2012.

As unlikely as it may sound, Andy Warhol was deeply impressed by Lucas Cranach's portraits of women. And indeed, some parallels are discernible between Cranach's mass production in his Wittenberg-based studio, and Andy Warhol's modern "factory." What counted for Cranach was not to produce unique works, but rather to produce them - or copies - in an efficient manner, and on time.