Portrait of a Lady (Margravine Elisabeth von Ansbach-Bayreuth?)

In January 1941 this portrait was handed to Hermann Göring as a present. The giver was Paul Walter, the Reich's commissioner for coal, and the go-between was Walter Andreas Hofer, the dealer who bought paintings for Göring's collection and had acquired this one a few months earlier from a Swiss lawyer living near Zürich. After the war the American authorities took it into the Central Collecting Point in Munich, and in 1961 it became the property of the Bavarian state collections. The museum has entered it on Lost Art, the German database for works whose history between 1933 and 1945 is incomplete, because nobody yet knows where it was before about 1939. Even the sitter is uncertain. The title proposes Margravine Elisabeth of Ansbach-Bayreuth, with a question mark. What Lucas Cranach the Younger set down with full certainty is her finery, chains and bracelets of finely chased gold with pearls and stones, against a plain ground that leaves nothing between us and her direct gaze.