Law and Grace

By 1529 Martin Luther's break with Rome was about twelve years old, and his ideas needed pictures simple enough to teach. Cranach, who ran a busy workshop in Wittenberg and was Luther's close friend, supplied them. This panel splits down the middle with a single tree, dead and bare on one side, green and living on the other. The left half shows humanity under the old Law, judged and driven toward hell. The right half shows the same person saved by Christ's death and resurrection, through faith alone. It was Luther's core teaching laid out as a diagram anyone could follow. This is one of the two earliest known versions Cranach made of the theme, both painted in that same year, 1529, while the new church was still taking shape.