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Lucas Cranach the Elder was born in Kronach, in Franconia, and trained as a painter before settling in Wittenberg around 1505 as court artist to the Electors of Saxony. He ran a large, productive workshop that supplied portraits, altarpieces, mythological scenes, and Reformation imagery for princely and civic patrons. His sons Hans and Lucas Cranach the Younger continued the studio after his death in Weimar in 1553.
Among his best-known works are the twin portraits of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora (1520s; versions in the Uffizi, Florence, and other collections), Judith with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1530; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Saint Helena with the Cross (1525; Cincinnati Art Museum). He also painted Venus, Lucretia, and Adam and Eve subjects that circulated widely through workshop replicas and woodcuts.
Cranach’s style mixes late Gothic line with clear northern Renaissance colour: elongated figures, crisp contours, and cool, enamel-like surfaces. As Luther’s close associate he shaped the visual language of early Protestantism while remaining a court painter of secular elegance. His images set a durable model for German portraiture and for the fusion of sacred and worldly subject matter in sixteenth-century northern art.