Portrait of a Woman

Look at her hands. She wears slashed gloves, cut so that the rings underneath show through, and more rings sit on top of the leather. The ones underneath are placed higher up the fingers than the ones on top, which no real hand would allow. Cranach cared more about showing how much gold she owned than about anatomy. The rest of her follows the same rule. A red velvet dress, heavy gold chokers stacked at the throat, pearls and gold thread worked into the headdress. On the bodice, pearls spell out a letter M, very likely her initial, though no one has managed to put a name to it. The face is smooth and general, close to the Venuses and Eves his workshop was painting in the same years, and like them she looks straight out at us. The panel came to London in 1857, bought at the sale of the contents of Alton Towers, the Staffordshire seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury.