Lucas Cranach the Elder

Lucas Cranach the Elder was court painter to the Electors of Saxony at Wittenberg for nearly fifty years, running a large and businesslike workshop. A close friend of Martin Luther, he painted and printed many portraits of the reformer and devised new Protestant religious imagery, while also turning out elegant, slender nudes from myth and the Bible. His son Lucas Cranach the Younger carried on the workshop. The National Gallery in London holds his Cupid complaining to Venus, and other works are in the Courtauld and the Royal Collection.