Portrait of Katharina Bora

The woman in this panel had done something almost unthinkable for her world: she had walked out of a convent. Katharina von Bora was placed in religious life as a child and took vows as a nun, then in 1523 slipped out of her Cistercian house by night, among a group of women smuggled away by families and friends. Two years later she married Martin Luther, and Cranach's workshop painted her as the reformer's wife, the companion to his portrait of the same year, 1529. She turns toward him from her own panel. The Latin words beside her come from a letter of Saint Paul to Timothy and read that a woman shall be saved through childbearing. She and Luther went on to raise six children in the emptied Wittenberg monastery that had become their home.