La Mélancolie

Cranach painted this in 1532, in Wittenberg, where he ran a busy workshop and was a close friend of Martin Luther. The seated winged woman is Melancholy herself, idly whittling a stick, borrowed in part from a famous engraving Albrecht Dürer had made 18 years earlier. But Cranach adds something darker. Up in the black cloud a company of witches rides through the air on goats and boars, and below them an army tumbles from its horses with no enemy in sight. This was a time when fear of witchcraft was real and growing, and Luther himself spoke of melancholy as a bath for the devil, a mood to be resisted. In the foreground three naked children push a large ball through a hoop, calm and oblivious to the storm overhead.