A Stag Hunt with the Elector Friedrich the Wise of Saxony

Look at the noble hunters on the far bank and you are looking at a scene that could not have happened when Cranach painted it. He made this in 1529, yet two of the men driving deer into the river, Elector Frederick the Wise and Emperor Maximilian I, were both dead by then. It works as a memento. Frederick's brother, John the Steadfast, seems to have ordered it to recall a real hunt from around 1497, when the Saxon princes were guests at Maximilian's court. Cranach gives the whole thing a bird's-eye view, the deer wading into a bend of water while crossbowmen wait on the opposite shore.