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In 1520, a year before Martin Luther's excommunication from the Catholic Church, the reformer was already writing letters that called Lucas Cranach his 'Gevatter,' godfather, the same warm nickname he used for Cranach's wife. Cranach had been court painter to the electors of Saxony in the small university town of Wittenberg since 1505, where Luther taught, and his workshop supplied portraits, altarpieces and courtly commissions to the ruling family for the next 45 years.

He was also a shrewd businessman who ran a printing press, a pharmacy and a wine shop in the town alongside his studio, and served three terms as Wittenberg's mayor. When Luther broke his monastic vows and married the former nun Katharina von Bora in 1525, Cranach stood as a witness at the wedding. The following year he became godfather to their first son, Hans.

His presses printed the woodcuts for Luther's German translation of the Bible, and his large workshop, run with paid assistants on something close to an assembly line, produced the portrait type still most familiar today, Luther in his black doctor's robe, sober and unsmiling. Cranach died in Weimar in 1553, at 81, having outlived Luther by seven years. The workshop and the family name passed to his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger, who kept it running for another three decades.