Серебряный век

This small panel illustrates an old Greek idea, told by the poet Hesiod, that human history declined through a series of ages, gold, then silver, then worse. The Silver Age ends badly, and Cranach shows why: naked men swing clubs at one another while women and children look on. He painted several versions of the scene across the 1520s and 1530s. By then he was the leading painter in Wittenberg, court artist to the Saxon electors and a close friend of Martin Luther, running a workshop that turned out these compact mythologies for educated collectors alongside all the religious work of the Reformation. The fighting figures crowd forward against a dark wood, with a walled town glimpsed far behind.