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Lot Essay
Emerging from the heart of the Wittenberg workshop, this compelling Crucifixion demonstrates the enduring afterlife of one of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s most eloquent inventions. Reprising the celebrated prototype of 1536 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1961.9.69), the present panel sustains the pictorial and theological drama that made the composition one of the most resonant Lutheran images of the sixteenth century. Against a night sky streaked with eerie bands of colour – an atmospheric, aurora-like phenomenon that heightens the cosmic force of the moment – Christ and the two thieves stand illuminated before a curving horizon that seems to withdraw into darkness, underscoring both the isolation and universality of the event. The barren, pebble-strewn foreground is stripped of anecdote; everything is ordered towards the revelation at the centre of the scene. Above the cross, Christ’s final words appear in German rather than Latin, while beside it, the mounted centurion pronounces his confession: “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).
From the moment of its creation, the Washington picture – and the select group of variants that followed – was understood within a Lutheran framework. The centurion, a gentile soldier who recognises Christ’s divinity at the instant of death, exemplifies sola fide, salvation through faith alone. His white horse evokes the figure of the Christian knight, an ideal circulated in contemporary humanist texts such as Erasmus’s Enchiridion and visualised in works like Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil. The Good Thief, who believes and is redeemed, offers a complementary demonstration of grace received solely through belief. The use of the vernacular further collapses mediation: the Word is offered directly to the viewer.
The present painting adheres closely to the 1536 model in the scale of the figures, the prancing centurion, and the placement and wording of the inscriptions, aligning it with the Elder’s workshop repetitions produced from the late 1530s into the 1540s. It sits near versions dated 1538 (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes; and New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery) and 1539 (Aschaffenburg, Staatsgalerie), which likewise maintain the core structure of the Elder’s prototype while adjusting elements of handling and finish. Here, the crisp articulation of the centurion’s armour, the taut modelling of the thieves’ bodies and the graphic clarity of the contouring are fully characteristic of practice in the Wittenberg shop under Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Within Cranach family production, the subject became one of the most successful vehicles for personal devotion among Lutheran patrons: stark, immediate and doctrinally unambiguous. By placing the viewer at the centurion’s point of sudden recognition – beneath the dying Saviour’s words, uttered without priestly mediation – the image visualises faith as an interior act. That clarity of message explains the lasting currency of the design within the workshop. In this panel, executed under Lucas Cranach the Younger, the moment of conversion retains its electrifying power: belief emerges not from miracle or spectacle, but from the simple recognition of truth.
We are grateful to Dieter Koepplin for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection (26 February 2025).
From the moment of its creation, the Washington picture – and the select group of variants that followed – was understood within a Lutheran framework. The centurion, a gentile soldier who recognises Christ’s divinity at the instant of death, exemplifies sola fide, salvation through faith alone. His white horse evokes the figure of the Christian knight, an ideal circulated in contemporary humanist texts such as Erasmus’s Enchiridion and visualised in works like Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil. The Good Thief, who believes and is redeemed, offers a complementary demonstration of grace received solely through belief. The use of the vernacular further collapses mediation: the Word is offered directly to the viewer.
The present painting adheres closely to the 1536 model in the scale of the figures, the prancing centurion, and the placement and wording of the inscriptions, aligning it with the Elder’s workshop repetitions produced from the late 1530s into the 1540s. It sits near versions dated 1538 (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes; and New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery) and 1539 (Aschaffenburg, Staatsgalerie), which likewise maintain the core structure of the Elder’s prototype while adjusting elements of handling and finish. Here, the crisp articulation of the centurion’s armour, the taut modelling of the thieves’ bodies and the graphic clarity of the contouring are fully characteristic of practice in the Wittenberg shop under Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Within Cranach family production, the subject became one of the most successful vehicles for personal devotion among Lutheran patrons: stark, immediate and doctrinally unambiguous. By placing the viewer at the centurion’s point of sudden recognition – beneath the dying Saviour’s words, uttered without priestly mediation – the image visualises faith as an interior act. That clarity of message explains the lasting currency of the design within the workshop. In this panel, executed under Lucas Cranach the Younger, the moment of conversion retains its electrifying power: belief emerges not from miracle or spectacle, but from the simple recognition of truth.
We are grateful to Dieter Koepplin for proposing the attribution after first-hand inspection (26 February 2025).