The Crucifixion

When Cranach painted this in 1503 he was a young man in Vienna, years before the name Cranach meant anything. He had not yet moved to Wittenberg, not yet become court painter to the electors of Saxony, not yet met Martin Luther or grown into the great image-maker of the Reformation. This is one of his earliest known paintings and his first altarpiece, and you can feel him trying something daring. Instead of setting Christ's cross squarely in the center, he swings the whole scene sideways, pushing the cross to the right, the two thieves to the left, and leaving the grieving Mary and John in the gap between. Behind them opens a wide northern landscape of mountains and a lake with a moated castle, the kind of homeland scenery he would go on painting for the rest of his life.