This same Archbishop Albrecht, whose features are also known to us
from two engravings by Dürer and a painting by Grünewald, was one of
the most generous patrons of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553),
whose busy workshops at Wittenberg supplied the whole north and east
of Germany with portraits, altarpieces, historical and mythological
pictures. Lucas Cranach was a follower of Grünewald, the great head of
the Colmar school. Apart from his merit as a colourist and an excellent
draughtsman, he attracts by the naïve grace of his nude figures and
by the complete manner in which he reflects the taste of his time and
country. But of the five little pictures that figure in the Louvre
Catalogue under his name, not one is from his own hand. Indeed, the
_Venus in a Landscape_ (No. 2703) is the only one that may with a
degree of safety be attributed to his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger,
who carried on the management of the studio some years before his
father’s death, and continued to imitate his style until his own death
in 1586. The _Venus_ bears the usual Cranach signature of a winged
serpent and the date 1520. The same crest, with the date 1532, figures
on the portrait of _Johann Friedrich III., Elector of Saxony_ (No.
2704), who is known on one occasion to have given a wholesale order of
sixty replicas of the same portrait to the Wittenberg master. It may be
imagined that a commission of this nature would not be executed by the
head of the studio, but left to his staff of assistants. The _Fighting
Savages_ (No. 2702A) and the two _Portraits_ (Nos. 2703A and 2705) are,
at the best, studio works.