The story
The painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, court artist to the electors of Saxony, took his very name from the town he came from, Kronach in Upper Franconia. Above the town rises the Festung Rosenberg, a vast fortress of the prince-bishops of Bamberg, and since 1983 part of it has housed the Fränkische Galerie, the oldest branch of the Bavarian National Museum in Munich.
Open from March to October, the gallery shows around 220 paintings and sculptures from across Franconia, late Gothic and Renaissance work from Bamberg, Nuremberg and Würzburg. There are panels from the Pleydenwurff workshop, pictures by Dürer's pupil Hans von Kulmbach and carvings from the Würzburg workshop of the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. The tour ends with a group of works by Cranach and his circle, enlarged in 2020. Among them is a small Diana and Actaeon on panel from around 1540, with the goddess turning the hunter into a stag, a workshop picture whose handling points to Cranach's son, Lucas the Younger.
