Per the request of a number of, as we say here in St. Louis, “Youse guys” … a little video tour of the artwork in my office. Sorry for the audio variations…the iPhone does a decent job with little videos, but you have to stay close to it as you talk!

No, I will not videotape myself doing my version of the happy dance, but I am. Why? Because I received today a copy of Cranach’s Weimar altar painting for my office. Talk about inspirational . . . being able to gaze and meditate on it as I work. Wow. Thanks to BGK!!

I ordered a book from Germany titled Historische Bilder zum Evangelisch-Lutherischen Gottesdienst, which translated, is Historical Paintings of the Evangelical Lutheran Divine Service. It is by Helmut Schatz, published as a digital printing by Druckerei Hage GmbH, Kösching. It contains a large collection of images from throughout Germany and Denmark, one from the Czech Republic as well. When and where I find them on the Internet and am able to copy and paste them into my blog, I will.

Here is one from Denmark. It is found on the altar at the Torslunde Church, a church that dates back to the year 1,200. The painting dates from 1561. As you can see it is painted on the altar itself.

Here is a close up:

I recently happened across this Roman Catholic “holy card” of the stoning of St. Stephen. As I’ve often noticed before, St. Stephen is depicted as looking, frankly, like a young woman. There is a disconcerting effiminate quality about a lot of these saints cards. Now, aside from the fact that Stephen was not stoned wearing vestments, one can’t help but wonder why it is in so many of these holy cards the saints are looking quite feminine. It is just something I’ve noticed. Not sure what it means. You’d almost think St. Stephen was one of the first deaconesses.

By Souren Melikian

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Do you remember a month ago when I mentioned that this Cranach painting was going up for auction? Well, it did and it sold for … ready for this? … over $7.6 million dollars. Here’s the story.

I’m a typography geek. Always have been. Always will be. I love not only words, but the way words are put onto a page. And I discovered an abolute delight of a documentary: Helvetica. Yes, a documentary devoted to a typeface. Sounds boring, I know. But, it is not.

If you enjoy the art of typography, then you must see this documentary on the world’s most ubiquitous typeface: Helvetica. It is one of the most legible typefaces ever created, arguably the most legible. You probably don’t even notice it, but it is everywhere. Some find its ominipresence distressing, others regard it as comforting.

This documentary tells the story of the typeface and how it has been received, used, and either accepted or rejected. I’ve decided to switch this blog site over to Helvetica, and I like what I see.

Years ago I chose two main faces for as much of my work as possible: Optima and Minion. They are still two of my favorites, but press me on my favorite typeface of all time and it will always be Helvetica. I never knew why. Now I do. And, if you watch this documentary, just count how many times a certain brand of computer appears.

More evidence that Lucas Cranach is being rediscovered. I wonder what old Master Cranach would think of this bit of news? Christie’s is holding an auction in April and among the items for sale are:


Beautiful portraits of the Princess Sybille of Cleves (estimate:
$4,000,000-6,000,000) by Lucas Cranach the Elder from the Important Old
Master Paintings sale Source

But here’s the question I had. Will the people paying millions for a portrait of Sybille have even the slightest clue about who she was and what she believed and what she did? I was delighted to read the following auction description:

This portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves (1512-1554) was painted
when she was fourteen years old and newly betrothed to Johann Friedrich
I (1503-1554), the future Elector of Saxony. The oldest daughter of
Johann III, Duke of Cleves, and Maria of Jülich-Berg, Sybille grew up
at court in Düsseldorf with her sister Anne, one of the future wives of
Henry VIII. Her marriage into the House of Saxony placed Sybille in the
middle of the greatest ideological struggle of the sixteenth century, a
reformation not only of the church but also of the state. A committed
friend and supporter of Martin Luther, Johann Friedrich was actively
engaged in the Reformation and took dramatic political and military
risks to protect the reformatory movement. Sybille conducted a
correspondence of her own with Martin Luther and actively supported her
husband’s many campaigns, defending Wittenberg in his absence during
Emperor Charles V’s siege of the city in 1546.

This portrait of Sybille was painted sometime after her betrothal to
Johann Friedrich in September 1526 and before their marriage on 3 June
1527. Emperor Charles V and Johann Friedrich’s uncle, the Elector
Friedrich III (called the Wise), had arranged a marriage between the
future Elector and the Emperor’s youngest sister Katharina in 1521.
With no wedding having materialized by February 1524 and the marriage
of Katharina to her cousin, King John III of Portugal, taking place in
February 1525, the Elector began searching for another bride for his
nephew. Johann Friedrich’s betrothal to Sybille of Cleves took place at
Burg on the Wupper on 8 September 1526 and the wedding ceremony
followed on 3 June 1527 at Torgau. Lucas Cranach provided the lavish
decorations.

The jeweled and feathered wreath, the object most associated with the
bride in sixteenth-century Germany, is the most obvious indication that
this portrait was painted after Sybille’s betrothal in September 1526.
The wreath was linked symbolically to the bride’s virginity, and she
presented it to the groom at the engagement and wedding ceremonies as
both a testament to and an offering of her virtue. The procession to
the church was an important part of the wedding ceremony on all
societal levels and at this time the bride would wear her hair loose or
uncovered apart from the wreath, as Sybille appears here. In her
procession into Saxony, Sybille was accompanied by two hundred horses
ridden by the nobility of Jülich and Cleves.

Apart from the wreath, symbols of her betrothal to Johann Friedrich are
literally woven into the fabric of Sybille’s dress. The House of Saxony
is symbolized by the pattern in the gold fabric of her sleeves and
around her waist and the three large interconnected chains around her
chest. The pendant hanging from her neck announces the joining of the
two families and suggests that this portrait was commissioned by her
father. The letters on the pendant, ‘i/j b c s’, indicate both her
lineage and the family she is soon to join – her father’s full title
was Duke of Iülich/Jülich, Berg and Cleves, and the dynasty she is
joining is that of Saxony.

A second betrothal portrait of Sybille of Cleves by Cranach appears
together with a pendant of Johann Friedrich in Weimar (fig. 1;
Schlossmuseum, oil on panel, 55 x 36 cm.). Both panels, signed with the
artist’s mark and dated 1526, are taller and slightly narrower than the
present portrait. Sybille wears the same dress with the Saxon pattern
woven into the gold fabric and the three large chains around her chest.
Her hair is similarly worn down and the wedding wreath likewise sits at
an angle on her head. Subtle changes in her pose and appearance,
however, suggest a slightly different moment and, perhaps, the passage
of time.

The Weimar painting shows Sybille in a similar three-quarter-length
pose against a dark background and her hands, rather than clasping one
another at her waist, are held one over the other in a slightly lower
position. Her hair has been pulled behind her shoulders and her face
has taken on a more mature aspect. Her features and bone structure are
more defined and her gaze appears to be more purposeful as she looks in
the direction of her husband. Two changes in Sybille’s dress are
significant: her dress is red, the color of the dynasty of Cleves, and
the pendant bearing her father’s initials has been replaced with a
jeweled cross.

While Friedländer dated the present painting to 1525 largely due to the
sitter’s more youthful appearance, the details of Sybille’s dress
confirm that both this portrait and the Weimar pendant were painted
during her nine-month betrothal to Johann Friedrich. Every aspect of
these portraits, from the fabrics and jewels to her hair and her pose,
had some significance to the contemporary viewer and while not all of
the iconography is decipherable today, the differences between the
Weimar painting and the present portrait may explain something about
the circumstances in which they were created. As a pendant, the Weimar
portrait served as a visual record of the formal joining of the houses
of Saxony and Cleves. As with the divisions of a coat of arms, she
represented her family by wearing the colors of her dynasty but the
replacement of the more personal pendant bearing her father’s initials
may be an acknowledgment of the necessary shift of her loyalties from
her own family to that of her husband.

No pendant to our portrait is known and the green fabric of Sybille’s
dress has no connection with either house. It could have been a color
that she particularly liked or carried some general association, as in
previous centuries, with hope. There is no question that the pendant in
this painting emphasizes her own lineage and it is possible that this
portrait was made for Sybille’s family in Cleves while the one in
Weimar was an official portrait documenting the match. Cranach’s linear
style and his abstract sense of volume indicated by the concentric
bands around Sybille’s chest and arms lends itself to the use of the
portrait medium as a way of signaling status. In court portraiture of
this period the signaling of status was the goal.

The union between Sybille of Cleves and Johann Friedrich of Saxony was
a successful one and seems to have been genuinely affectionate. They
had four sons, three of whom lived to adulthood to become Dukes of
Saxony, Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Gotha. Johann Friedrich conceded the
capital city of Wittenberg to Charles V in 1547 in order to save the
lives of his wife and sons and Luther’s letter to Sybille of 30 March
1544 reflects her feelings of loss when he was away:

That your Electoral Princessly Grace is unhappy because Our Most
Gracious Lord, Your Electoral Princessly Grace’s husband, is away, I
can well believe. But because it is necessary, and because his absence
is in the service and for the good of Christianity and the German
nation, we must bear it patiently in accordance with God’s will. If the
devil were able to keep the peace, then we would have more peace and
less to do, and especially less unpleasantness to bear.

The present work was part of the superb collection of old master
paintings formed by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred W. Erickson. Alfred Erickson
(1876-1936) was of Swedish descent but was born at Farmers Mill, New
York. He was educated at Brooklyn and at the age of twenty-four began a
long association with the advertising business that culminated in the
establishment of the Erickson Advertising Agency, later to become
McCann-Erickson, Inc. In the 1920s he and his wife, Anna, began to
assemble a collection of paintings that would represent the development
of European art from the quattrocento
to the end of the eighteenth century. His widow continued to add
selectively to the collection after her husband’s death in 1936. The
collection was dispersed in a ground-breaking sale at Parke-Bernet
Galleries on 15 November 1961 where 24 lots fetched a total of
$4,679,250. The portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves by Cranach was
lot 6 in that sale and was purchased for $105,000 by Agnew’s, the
London dealers, on behalf of the late Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. It was
the preceding lot to Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer purchased for the world record price of $2,300,000 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. held an avid interest in literature and the
English language since his undergraduate years at Harvard, and he
focused his early energies on the collection of manuscripts and first
edition books by renowned English authors, including Milton, Pepys,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Keats, and Lewis Carroll, later extending these
to include landmark literary objects that eventually embraced two
Gutenberg Bibles and the unparalleled Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp
(folios of which were offered by Christie’s in 1976 and 1988). He
formed an outstanding collection of miniature books, became an
experienced amateur in English Silver, which he collected into the
1950s, and acquired over time a small but exquisite number of
paintings, including the Cranach offered here. Harvard, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions are today
the beneficiaries of donations made by Mr. Houghton from the various
collections he formed during his lifetime.

We would like to thank Maike Vogt-Lüerssen for her generous help in
cataloguing this note. We are further grateful to Dr. Werner Schade for
confirming the attribution to Lucas Cranach the Elder on the basis of
photographs (private communication, 22 February 2008).

Oh, by the way, Christie’s is also selling Picasso’s take on this portrait. He did this one based on Cranach’s portraits. I say without an ounce of hesitation that Picasso’s work is garbage. Yes, I’ve studied art history. Yes, I’ve seen a lot of Picasso’s work. Yes, I know all about modern art. And, for the most part, it is, and remains, garbage.

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Here’s an interesting story from the Times Online. Cranach is suddenly the subject of newfound interest in the art world. Of course, we Lutherans love him because he is one of our own, friend of Luther, painter of the Reformation extraordinary. He and his son produced masterworks like this one. But it is nice to see old Lucas finally getting the attention he deserves.

Why the sudden interest in Lucas Cranach? Having successfully avoided most
people’s attention for half a millennium, he seems to be popping up all over
the shop. Switch on the television drama Desperate Housewives, for instance,
and the first image in the opening credits is an animated version of his
Adam and Eve, successfully setting the slyly sexy tone for the suburban
shenanigans ahead. Then there was that amusing squall in a teapot recently
about a Cranach Venus that Transport for London refused to display on
Underground platforms because the poster was deemed inappropriate. This
cretinous decision, now reversed, was prompted by a shoddy piece of printing
that made it appear as if Venus was showing off her pubic hair and a sexy
cleft. She wasn’t. Her see-through veil had merely cast a suggestive shadow.
You need to wait until the middle of the 19th century, and Courbet, before
art dared to confront you with realistically painted pudenda.

It isn’t only into cheap media spotlights that Cranach has been thrust. The
serious art institutions are also fascinated by him. Last year, the
Courtauld Institute organised a wonderful little display devoted to his
naughty Adam and Eve. Now a full career overview at the Royal Academy seeks
to correct the two misconceptions that continue to circulate about our man:
that slyly sexy Venuses were his main subject; and that he was a greedy
churner-out of popular formats.

Max Friedländer, a regularly impressive German art historian who was rarely
wrong about anything, supplied the most withering assessment of Cranach as
far back as the 1930s, when he concluded, in his definitive tome on the
artist: “Had Cranach died in 1505, he would have lived in our memory as an
artist charged with dynamite. But he did not die until 1553, and instead of
watching his powers explode, we see them fizzle out.” Ever since Friedländer
wrote that, the rest of us have believed it.

The Academy, in a terrific display of art-historical chutzpah, begs to differ.
And, because its show is arranged more or less chronologically, yet arrives
at Cranach’s Venuses only in its final room, the first misconception, that
sly nudes were his speciality, is easily corrected. The next accusation,
that he spent two-thirds of his career phoning it in, is so deeply embedded
that challenging it takes the length of the show.

Although Cranach was born in 1472, the earliest works we know by him were not
painted until he was about 30 years old. So, the first decade of his output
is still out there waiting to be discovered. Which means the opening
sighting we have of him here, a gory Crucifixion attended by a band of
voyeuristic Franconian nobles who’ve ridden in from the castle at the back,
is already the work of a thoroughly accomplished artist. No build-up. No
foreplay. And, just five years later, in 1505, he painted what many consider
his masterpiece: an action-packed imagining of The Martyrdom of St Catherine.

Because we live in godless times, I cannot assume you know the story. If you
don’t, this fireworks display of a painting may strike you as confusing.
There’s so much going on in it. Catherine was a beautiful princess from
Alexandria whose crime was to persuade 50 heathen philosophers to convert to
Christianity. She was sentenced to torture on a wheel studded with spikes,
but God destroyed this murderous wheel with a lightning bolt. There it is in
the background of Cranach’s frantic crowd scene, being blown apart by a
celestial bomb attack. The emperor Maxentius then ordered that Catherine be
beheaded instead. And that is the moment we are witnessing: her imminent
decapitation.

But look how inventively, and in how many happy directions, Cranach’s exciting
painting strays off its narrative path. What is that executioner wearing?
One of his legs sports a thigh-length boot, but the other does not. Half his
outfit is white, while the other half is covered in multicoloured stripes.
Look, too, at the mass of heaving bodies being blown up by the lightning.
What impossible positions they adopt. With a colour scheme unlike any other
of its times, and a cast of contortionists taking the bit parts, this great
and mysterious painting makes instantly clear that we are in the presence of
a Renaissance master with a spectacularly unique vision.

Cranach was from Kronach, in Franconia – a loaded stretch of Germany with
Nuremburg in it, and Bayreuth, that nowadays constitutes northern Bavaria.
This was also where his friend Martin Luther started Christianity’s big
civil war, and the region has never since been able to decide if it is
Catholic or Protestant. So it has zigzagged between the two positions, as,
indeed, did the art of Cranach.

The fantastical religious paintings that surround The Martyrdom of St
Catherine in the first outburst of his career confirm the impression that a
momentous and unruly talent has been unleashed. Familiar subjects – the
Crucifixion, the stigmatisation of St Francis – are reinvented outrageously
by an artist determined not to do anything the way others did it. If the
religious convolutions in the foregrounds are too complex for you, there are
always the backgrounds to enjoy. Cranach was a superb landscapist who always
set his biblical duels in recognisable stretches of Upper Franconia, where
tottering Harry Potter castles wobble atop mysterious riverside crags.

Because his imagination darted about so much, there wasn’t much he didn’t try.
There are portraits, altarpieces, bits of contemporary genre pictures that
tug your heartstrings and ones that make you laugh. His woodcuts throb and
squirm with events, like an angler’s worm tin. And a gorgeous nocturnal
Nativity sets him the tough task of painting candlelit reflections at night.
Nowhere does his art settle on a standard look.

I enjoyed, too, his sudden lurch into grotesqueness with a set of cruel
paintings mocking the union first of toothless old men with young girls,
then of toothless old women with young boys. Just when you think too many
tankards of sarcasm are being emptied into Cranach’s art, he switches tack
again with a series of noble portrait heads, produced in the unusual medium
of oil on paper, that prove what an astute recorder of character he was. The
young Luther, for one, stops being a famous name in a textbook and becomes a
strange-looking fellow with high cheekbones, tiny eyes and a fierce Oriental
cast to his features that promises lots of belligerence. Cranach never gives
you what you think you are going to get. Even as mundane a subject as a twin
portrayal of the apostles Peter and Paul turns into a battle of hairy
eccentrics, won easily by an unlikely St Peter, whose combed-over receding
hairline and scruffily twisted moustache give him the air of a recently
widowed pudding salesman.

Lots of Cranach’s art has a smile on its face. But it’s never a kind smile,
always a sarcastic and bitter one. The final room, where the Venuses are
gathered, and around which I urge the officials of Transport for London to
skulk with their magnifying glasses aloft, searching for clefts and pubic
hair – because they won’t find any – is as full of weird surprises as any
room that precedes it. By this time, Cranach is the head of a large and
successful studio. In worldly terms, he was among the most successful of all
Renaissance artists. Yet, even when his art appears to be mass-producing
sexy Venuses, it never actually repeats itself. Every Venus is different.
True, the surfaces are harder and slicker – Friedländer complained that the
late paintings made him think of chestnuts at conker time – but the
unexpected leaps of imagination continue to bring joy.

Look at the extraordinary figure of Mercury presiding over The Judgment of
Paris. Gnarled, grey-haired, bearded: he must be 70 if he’s a day. Where
else in art is Mercury a creaky 70-year-old?

Thus, a successfully revisionist show proves Cranach’s fizzling-out was
actually a redirection of his efforts. And that a giant has been mistaken
for a tiddler.

Cranach, Royal Academy, W1, until June 8

Concordia Publishing House is pleased to announce the opening of its on-line virtual art gallery.

As frequent readers of this blog site know, I really love fine art, and most particularly, fine art depicting Christian themes. While preparing our family’s Christmas newsletter, I came across this striking painting: The Nativity by Federico Fiori Barocci (1597, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain). What I find unique about this painting is that it sets the birth of Christ in quite a realistic setting, unlike many depictions from the 16th century. Most interesting to me is how Joseph is opening the door of the stable to the shepherds, who are coming to see this great thing that has come to pass, as the angels had told them. You can almost hear St. Joseph saying, "Yes, he is right here, come in and see!"

I stumbled across a site I had not been to before the other day. And, it really amazed me. It is the "Web Gallery of Art" and has a huge collection. The feature I enjoy the most is the fact that they allow you to expand the image to fill your computer screen and so, you can really study the paintings they have on display. I highly recommend it!

Here are some more photos I took in the Magdeburg Cathedral along with additional information. I’ve put this post in an extended entry. First is the text explaining the photos, then the photos following. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Please know that all the photos are in lower resolution than the original, but if you click on the screen shot you’ll get a better and larger photo behind it. I hope they don’t make you as sad as the young lady to the left!

Warning: dial up users may experience significant download times. So, click through at your own risk. Ye be warned! 

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A friend recently pointed a wonderful web site out to me. As most readers of this blog site know, I really love fine art and particularly art depicting Christian/Biblical themes. What a gold mine! Thanks Joe!  Biblical Art on the WWW.

I was reflecting on a recent blog post, mentioned here and elsewhere, in which a person takes a stab at providing "essential" paintings for theologians, a very well done post indeed. I recalled that at some point I had blogged on one of my favorite posts: Lucas Cranach’s marvelous altar painting for the Lutheran church of St. Peter and Paul, in Weimar, Germany. I did a bit of a search and discovered, ironically, that I had blogged on this very subject, about this very painting, on … Jan. 15, 2005, just one year ago. How many American churches feature a painting on the altar like this
one? What a painting! Christ and Him crucified, with blood spurting out
on to the head of a man standing in the painting. Powerful stuff! This is a painting that preaches Christ! I’ve been in far too many churches that look not much more like big
lecture halls. Somehow there arose in some Reformation churches the
idea that sterile design and undecorated worship spaces is better than
richly ornamented and decorated churches. That’s a real shame. Of course there is no sin in simplicity but the opposite is also
true, there is no sin in beautiful art adorning a house of God. God
Himself thought it a wonderful thing, for in the Old Testament, in the
tabernacle and temple both, He commanded that His people use the finest
building materials available to them. He directed them to decorate and
paint and prepare beautiful sculpture for the interiors of these places
of worship.

I would love a chance to meditate on a painting such as this one every Sunday, wouldn’t you?

This painting is was painted by Lucas Cranach and completed by his son Lucas Cranach, Jr.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Self Portrait

Lucas Cranach was a contemporary of Martin Luther. He lived and
worked for much of his life in Wittenberg, Germany. He was a prosperous
member of the community, serving as mayor of the city for a period of
time. He owned the local pharmacy. He ran a painting business and also
opened a publishing house. All said, Lucas was a wealthy man. He was
also a faithful Lutheran Christian who later in his life walked away
from his businesses and position to join his prince in captivity.

Lucas Cranach is most well known for his paintings. Though not as
refined or skilled as other German Renaissance painters, such as
Albrecht Durer, he did a good job of capturing facial features, etc.
He is the painter of record for the Reformation, painting numerous
portraits of Luther and other significant Lutheran figures. When his
prince, John Frederick the Magnanimous was taken captive in 1547 by the
Roman Catholic Emperor Charles V, Lucas Cranach followed his prince
into captivity in the city of Weimar, dying there in 1553. His last
painting, actually completed by his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger, is
a a beautiful and powerful confession of Lucas’ faith. Here is an
explanation of the painting.

There is a wonderful interactive description of the painting
provided by the church where the painting is found, St. Peter and Paul,
in Weimar, Germany which is still to this day an active Lutheran
congregation. The downside is that it is in German. Here is a link to that site. Read further for an discussion in English about the painting.

A Painting that Preaches Christ

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is certainly true of the
center panel of the altar painting in the church of Sts Peters and
Paul, Weimar, Germany. It was begun by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) and
was completed by his son, also of the same name, in 1555. (To
distinguish them, they are called Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas
Cranach the Younger.)

The heart of the 16th century Reformation and indeed of the
Christian faith, is the doctrine of justification by faith alone in
Christ. This is how Luther expresses it in part 2 of the Smalcald
Articles.

“The first and chief article is this, that Jesus Christ, our God and
Lord, “was put to death for our trespasses and raised again for our
justification” (Rom 4:25). He alone is “the Lamb of God, who takes away
the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “God has laid upon him the
iniquities of us all” (Isa.53:6). Moreover, “all have sinned,” and
“they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption
which is in Christ Jesus, by his blood” (Rom. 3:23-25).

Inasmuch as this must be believed and cannot be obtained or
apprehended by any work, law, or merit, it is clear and certain that
such faith alone justifies us, as St Paul says in Romans 3, “For we
hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law” (Rom.
3:28), and again, “that he [God] himself is righteous and that he
justifies him who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).”

If the doctrine of justification is to be properly taught, law and
gospel must be properly distinguished. The Formula of Concord of 1577
says (Article 5),

“We must … observe this distinction with particular diligence lest
we confuse the two doctrines and change the Gospel into law. This would
darken the merit of Christ and rob disturbed consciences of the comfort
which they would otherwise have in the holy Gospel …”

That Lucas Cranach clearly understood the central teaching of the
Lutheran reformation and the proper distinction between Law and Gospel
is illustrated by his altar painting at Weimar.

In the center background, Moses is shown teaching the ten
commandments to the Old Testament prophets. They are standing on a
circle of barren path, along with a figure representative of all human
beings who are under the law’s condemnation. Man is shown here being
chased into the fires of hell by death (pictured as a skeleton holding
a spear) and the devil (in the form of a monster wielding a club). The
prophets taught, as did Moses, “Cursed be anyone who does not confirm
the words of this law by doing them” (Deut. 27:26 ESV, compare Jer.
11:13). Yet it’s not only our actual sins that condemn us, but also the
prior sin that we inherit from our parents (original sin). To quote the
Smalcald Articles once again,

“Here we must confess what St Paul says in Rom. 5:12, namely, that
sin had its origin in one man, Adam, through whose disobedience all men
were made sinners and became subject to death and the devil. … The
fruits of this sin are all the subsequent evil deeds which are
forbidden in the Ten Commandments …”

The good news is that God in mercy and compassion saves all who put
their trust in His Son. When the people of Israel in the wilderness
sinned and were bitten by snakes, God provided a way of escape that
prefigured His Son’s death on a cross. All the Israelites had to do to
be saved was look at the snake mounted on a pole (Num. 21:4-9). In
Cranach’s painting, this is shown in the background on the painting’s
left.

Directly in front, Martin Luther is standing with open Bible in
hand. His feet and hands are positioned like those of Moses. His
message, however, is one of gospel, not law. On his face is a look of
steadfastness and serene confidence. He stands on lush grass in which
flowers grow, unlike the bare, stony ground on which Moses stands. Of
three passages written in German on the open Bible, the third one
reads, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so also must
the Son of man be lifted up, so that all [who believe] in [him may have
eternal life]” (Jn 3:14).

Dominating the painting is Christ on a cross. The amazing message of
the Gospel is that by his death, Christ takes away the world’s sin. The
message written in Latin on the transparent banner held by the lamb in
the center foreground declares that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29). His outstretched arms and
generous loincloth are also reminders that He is the world’s Savior.
This was John the Baptist’s message, and John is shown standing
underneath the crucified Christ on His left side. With right hand
pointing up at Christ on the cross and left hand pointing at the lamb,
John is shown proclaiming the meaning of Jesus’ death to Lucas Cranach,
the painter. Cranach represents all who believe. A stream of blood from
Christ’s pierced side splashes on to this head. It is as the first
verse on Luther’s Bible says, “The blood of Jesus Christ purifies us
from all sin” (1 Jn 1:7). Therefore like Luther, Cranach also stands
confidently.

There is another verse on the open Bible, to which Luther’s finger
points directly. It reads, “Therefore let us approach the seat of grace
with joyousness, so that we may receive mercy within and find grace in
the time when help is needed” (Heb. 4:16). Such approach is possible
because Jesus is our victorious high priest. Having paid for sin, He
has defeated death and the devil and now lives to intercede for us.
Jesus is shown on the painting’s right as the risen One, youthful and
full of life, standing on death and the devil, with the staff of his
victory flag pushed in the monster’s throat. His gold-edged cloak flows
toward the lamb’s banner and the cross. As a result it’s actually both
banner and cloak that bear the words, “the lamb of God who takes away
the sin of the world”.

“Believe in God; believe also in me,” the Lord says (Jn 14:1). From
this painting His eyes meet ours, inviting us to believe in Him. The
other set of eyes that meet ours belong to Cranach, the painter. His
feet face in the direction of Christ. But he has turned from his
adoration of Christ to look at us also, inviting us to believe and be
saved along with him.

Article 4 of the Augsburg Confession expresses the heart of Lutheran teaching this way:

“[W]e receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by
grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, when we believe that Christ
suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and
righteousness and eternal life are given to us.”

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal
life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). This, in summary, is the
message of the Lutheran reformation and of its foremost artists, Lucas
Cranach the Elder and the Younger.

–Pastor David Buck