Retrato Feminino

By 1530 Lucas Cranach ran one of the busiest workshops in Germany, in Wittenberg, the town where Martin Luther had launched the Reformation little more than a decade before. Cranach was Luther's friend and his portraitist, and his shop turned out pictures at a pace no single hand could manage, religious panels, portraits of the Saxon princes, and elegant women like this one. We do not know who she is. She is dressed in the height of German court fashion, a broad plumed hat and a richly patterned gown, the same costume that reappears on other women in Cranach's output. The face was worked up in the workshop from a drawing by the master, one fashionable Saxon lady among the many the shop produced.