Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon

By the time this portrait was painted, the man in it had been dead for years. Philipp Melanchthon, the scholar who stood beside Martin Luther through the Reformation and drafted the Augsburg Confession of 1530, died in Wittenberg in 1560. This version dates from around 1570. Cranach's workshop did not paint it from life. They traced an established pattern onto the canvas, the way the studio produced reformer portraits over and over for people who wanted their teachers on the wall. He appears half-length in a plain black coat, a red doublet showing beneath, holding a closed book. Melanchthon was known as the Teacher of Germany for the schools and curricula he built across Protestant lands, and that book is the attribute fixed to him. His face here is calm and a little worn, copied from the likeness the Cranachs had settled on in his final years.