Portraits of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon

By 1543 the Reformation had its two recognised faces, and here they are together, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, each on a small panel about the size of a page. Luther, the preacher, holds his book. Melanchthon, the scholar who framed the new teaching in words, looks across from the companion picture. Cranach's workshop turned out pairs like this in numbers, and the point was reach rather than grandeur. A likeness small enough to carry could put the leaders of the movement into a private house, a study, a merchant's collection, far from Wittenberg. They came to the Medici in Catholic Florence as curiosities from the other side of a divided Europe, which is how two portraits of Protestant reformers ended up in the Uffizi.