Portraits of Johann I and Frederick III the Wise, Electors of Saxony

These are two small panels made to travel as a pair, and both men in them were dead by the time they were painted. On one side is Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, who in 1521 had spirited Luther away to the safety of Wartburg Castle after the emperor outlawed him; he died in 1525. Beside him is his brother John the Steadfast, who kept up that protection and died in 1532. The year after, their heir Johann Friedrich ordered 60 pairs of little portraits of the two electors from Cranach, whose Wittenberg workshop served the Saxon court. An account book in Leipzig records the payment on the tenth of May, 1533. The pairs were sent out to argue one point: that Saxony's Protestant leadership had passed cleanly from uncle to father to son. This particular pair reached Florence much later, carried into the Medici collection as part of a bride's dowry from Urbino.