Primitive People

The National Gallery once catalogued this panel as The Close of the Silver Age. It now goes by the plainer Primitive People, and the change is a fair measure of how unsure everyone still is about the story. Two pairs of men fight in a clearing. The attackers stand over their victims, darker-skinned and long-bearded, while the men they are beating lie almost defenceless on the ground. The women and children are right there beside them. One woman reclines on the grass as if nothing were happening, another reacts in alarm, a third looks away out of the picture. Far off, towers and walls stand for the settled world these people have not yet reached. Cranach's workshop painted this scene several times between about 1527 and 1535, and scholars reach for different classical texts to explain it, Hesiod's declining ages of mankind, or Ovid's early peoples living wild in the forests. German writers have given it yet another name, The Fruits of Jealousy. This version belonged to a collector in Kassel in the 1880s and came to the gallery in 1924 with the bequest of the industrialist Ludwig Mond.