CRANACH, Lucas the Elder
(b. 1472, Kronach, d. 1553, Weimar)

Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora

1526
Panel, 23 x 16 cm (each)
Wartburg-Stiftung, Eisenach

In the 1520s Cranach was involved in Wittenberg's large book-printing business. There are remarkable similarities between the sizes of Cranach's paintings and the paper and book formats used in Wittenberg at that time. The portrait series of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora in the 1520s by Cranach were painted on quarto-sized panels. (If a sheet of paper is folded once, this produces the folio format, then come quarto: 4 leaves with 8 pages.)