Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder

This name points to a place as much as a person. In Wittenberg, in what is now eastern Germany, Lucas Cranach the Elder ran one of the busiest painting businesses of the 16th century, and much of what left it was made by many hands working to his patterns.

From the mid-1520s Cranach reorganised the shop for speed, standardising figures and poses so that assistants, among them his sons Hans and Lucas the Younger, could turn out versions of a design fast. Its biggest product was the Reformation itself. Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther, the monk whose protest split the Western church, and the shop produced portrait after portrait of Luther and his circle, along with the woodcuts for Luther's German Bible. So many near-identical Luthers survive that scholars often cannot say which came from the master's own hand. A panel catalogued as Workshop of Cranach means exactly that, a picture made to his design and to his standard, in the shop he built, with no single securely named painter behind the brush.