The Ill-Matched Couple

In his Praise of Folly, printed in 1511, the Dutch scholar Erasmus made fun of old men with one foot in the grave who took tender young girls as wives, a habit he called common practice, almost something to boast about. Over the following decades the joke became one of the steadiest lines in Cranach's workshop, painted again and again for buyers who liked a moral lesson with a laugh in it. This version is tiny, about 20 centimetres high, and dates from around 1530 to 1540. The old man, bald and white-bearded in a heavy fur collar, presses his lips to the girl's cheek and holds her by the jaw. Her eyes slide past him toward the viewer, with the faintest smile. The panel came to the Belvedere in 2020, part of a bequest from the Maurer collection in Vienna.