Lot and his Daughters

The story comes from Genesis. God destroys the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire, Lot escapes with his two daughters, and his wife, who looks back, is turned into a pillar of salt. Cranach pushes all of that into the distance. Far off the city burns under a dark sky, the small family hurries along the road below it, and behind them a white figure stands still.

The foreground shows what came next. Hiding in the hills and believing no man was left to give them children, the daughters make their father drunk and lie with him. Cranach dresses them as young women of a German court in 1528, in velvet gowns with gold-embroidered sleeves and necklaces of red coral. One pours wine from a flask into the golden bowl in Lot's hands, the other leans against his shoulder. The painting belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, left the imperial collection in the 1770s for the Schottenstift, a Benedictine abbey in Vienna, and was bought back in 1963.