Virgen con el Niño y el joven san Juan Bautista

Cranach painted this Madonna in 1514 in Wittenberg, in Saxony, where he was court painter to the Elector Frederick the Wise. It looks surprisingly Italian for a German picture. The Virgin sits above a rocky landscape, the Christ Child and the little John the Baptist trade gestures and glances, all of it borrowed from Raphael, whom Cranach knew only through prints and copies. Within a few years his own town would become the centre of the Reformation, and Cranach its chief image-maker and a friend of Martin Luther, turning out a very different kind of picture from this sweet Madonna. The panel later hung in a Carthusian charterhouse outside Florence. It was stolen from the Uffizi in 1973 and not recovered until 2001.