Melancolia

By 1532 Lucas Cranach had spent years as court painter in Wittenberg, the small Saxon town where Martin Luther preached and where Cranach was Luther's close friend and printer. That closeness shows here. Cranach borrows the winged, brooding figure from Dürer's famous engraving of melancholy, made 18 years earlier, but bends the idea toward Luther's teaching. For Luther a mind sunk in gloom was a mind open to the Devil, and the storm of riders in the dark sky is exactly that danger. The winged woman calmly whittles a stick, an old sign of idle hands, while naked children play at her feet. Cranach painted several versions of this scene in these years, each with the same sharpened stick.