Diana and Actaeon

By about 1540 the Cranach workshop in Wittenberg was the busiest painting business in Germany, run inside Martin Luther's own circle, and it turned out religious pictures and courtly nudes with equal ease. This one steps away from scripture into Ovid. The hunter Actaeon has wandered into a spring where Diana, goddess of the hunt, is bathing with her women. For that accident he is being changed into a stag, and his own hounds will soon bring him down without knowing him. Subjects from Ovid were rare in the Cranach shop, which came to such myths late. The winged serpent near the lower edge is the family's signature, stamped on pictures they produced by the hundred.