Rest on the Flight to Egypt

By 1504 Lucas Cranach was working in and around Vienna, caught up with a circle of artists doing something new with landscape, filling their pictures with dense German forests and glowing alpine light. He brings that world to a Bible story. Instead of an Egyptian desert, the Holy Family rests in a clearing of firs and birches, surrounded by small angels who fetch water and make music for the child. Within a year Cranach would move to Wittenberg as court painter to the Saxon elector and spend decades running a busy workshop. This panel comes from just before that, and it carries, for the first time, the linked initials LC that would mark his work for the rest of his life.