Quotes About Cranach

Cranach was one of Martin Luther's close allies and, in the mid-sixteenth century, he produced altarpieces for Lutheran churches in Wittenburg, Weimar, Schneeburg, Kemberg, Regensburg, and Dessau. Unlike other reformers, Luther never forbade images, especially of the crucifixion, and many of Cranach's paintings and altarpieces functioned as didactic exercises, almost schematic diagrams of Lutheran soteriology.

One of the countless symbolic or allegorical images of the sexual act is a deer hunt: A detail from a painting by the 16th-century German artist Cranach. The sexual implication of the deer hunt is underlined by a medieval English folk song called "The Keeper": The first doe that he shot at he missed, And the second doe he trimmed he kissed, And the third ran away in a young man's heart, She's amongst the leaves of the green O.