St. John's Church (Dessau)

Around the table in this Last Supper sit portraits of real men. Lucas Cranach the Younger, the Wittenberg painter, gave the apostles the faces of Reformation leaders, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon among them, and of the princely house of Anhalt, while Prince Joachim of Anhalt, who had died four years earlier, kneels in the foreground in rich robes. The man pouring the wine wears a signet ring and is taken to be Cranach himself.

The panel, dated 1565, was made as Joachim's memorial for the Marienkirche, the town church beside the palace. During the Second World War it was taken out for safekeeping, and that saved it. In March 1945 bombing burned the Marienkirche, and a cycle of 53 Cranach paintings on its gallery was lost. After the war the Last Supper passed through Wörlitz, a nearby palace town, and the village church of Mildensee, and in 1992 it came to the Johanniskirche, a Baroque parish church built between 1690 and 1702, where it hangs today.