La fontana della giovinezza

Cranach painted this in 1546, when he was in his 70s and had spent a lifetime in the service of the Saxon court. It reads from left to right like a wish. Old women, some carried in on wheelbarrows and stretchers, are lowered into a long pool, and as they wade across they grow young again, stepping out on the right to change into fine clothes and join the dancing and feasting. Painting aged, sagging bodies at all was unusual then, when nudes were almost always young and ideal. On the far left a man in a red coat holds a book and watches the bathers closely, most likely a scholar or doctor there to judge whether the water works.