Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon

The man in this small panel of 1543 is Philipp Melanchthon, the scholar who stood beside Martin Luther through the whole Reformation and did much of the patient work of turning it into a settled teaching. A professor of Greek at Wittenberg in his 20s, he wrote the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the text that still states what Lutheran churches believe, and Germans later called him their teacher, Praeceptor Germaniae. Cranach paints him without drama, in a dark gown against a plain blue ground, a lean and bookish face beside the heavier presence of Luther. Portraits like this rarely travelled alone. Melanchthon's likeness was made to hang next to Luther's, the thinker and the preacher shown as a matched pair.