The Immaculate Virgin with the Child and Two angels

These two tiny panels forming a diptych are well conserved. The first shows the Virgin and Child and the second Saint John the Baptist, united though by the same background landscape. The Baptist can be identified thanks to his traditional attributes – the leather tunic, the book, the lamb, the cross – and by the inscription “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John”, from the Gospel According to Saint John (1:6). Standing on a crescent moon, following a widespread iconographical custom of northern Europe, the Virgin is crowned by two flying angels, while Jesus stretches forwards to take a rose from his mother’s hand. Despite their miniature dimensions, the two panels are so full of detail they must be looked at through a magnifying glass.
Cranach accurately describes the fur of the Baptist’s tunic, enriched with touches of gold: the leaves, flowers and grasses, pictured one by one. Look how the artist stops to describe the lace cuff of the Virgins robe, or her hair, which seems ruffled by a light breeze.
It seems as though the air really does move over the land, bathed by the light of sunset. One of the most important painters of the German sixteenth century, Cranach came from a family of artists (his father and sons were painters). For almost all his life he worked in Wittenberg at the court of the prince electors of Saxony, but he also painted for other patrons, becoming renowned as a portrait painter (his Portrait of Martin Luther is famous; there is a copy in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum) and for his profane nudes. This diptych is datable to the years between 1550 and 1552, when the artist was in Augsburg, where he had the opportunity to see Italian works evoked in the monumental and almost classical figure of the Baptist.