This drawing is attributed to Lucas Cranach the Younger. It dates from the period when he worked in his father’s Wittenberg workshop, which had close ties to Luther, yet also produced works for Catholic commissioners. The sheet shows a group of naked humans in awe of a radiant Christ. His torso emerges from the darkly washed folds of his mantle, which drape over those gathered around him.

This image recalls a prominent subject of Catholic piety: the Virgin of Mercy who with her mantle promised intercession and has been associated with the mother hen from Scripture. Here, in her stead, it is Christ himself who saves the faithful as he ‘spreads out his mercy … like a mantle’ (Luther 1544: 447; Steiger 2020: 42). This deprives the Virgin of her traditional role which according to Protestant assertions was baseless (Heal 2007: 54–56). The drawing has therefore been read as a Protestant appropriation and repurposing of Catholic imagery (Koerner 2004: 52–68).

Indeed, the drawing reinterprets Catholic visual culture in yet another way. Christ’s flagged staff evokes representations of his Descent into Hell. This scene was habitually depicted as the Saviour freeing those Righteous who had died before he did from the limbus patrum, hell’s outermost margin (Franceschini 2017: 60–72). In contrast to this medieval scholastic tradition, those saved in Cranach’s drawing are enfolded in clouds and angels. This detaches Christ’s victory and their redemption from the idea of limbo whose existence Lutheran theology rejected (ibid: 258–259).

Yet, unlike the depictions of Christ’s victory over death that the Cranach workshop made for Protestant contexts, this drawing does not show Christ alone (ibid: 264–266). Even some typical inmates of limbo appear around him: Adam, to whom Christ reaches out, and behind him Eve, the only one smiling (Koepplin 2010: 64). These denominational ambiguities could explain why no painted version of this preparatory drawing is known. Perhaps, though reworked, it still resembled Catholic imagery too strongly.

References

Franceschini, Chiara. 2017. Storia del limbo (Milan: Feltrinelli)

Heal, Bridget. 2007. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: CUP)

Koepplin, Dieter 2010. ‘Höllenfahrten’, in Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den Hohenzollern (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag), pp. 59–71

Koerner, Joseph L. 2004. The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Luther, Martin. ed. 1915 [1544]. ‘Hauspotille. Am Eylfften Sontag nach der Trifeltigkeyt’, in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 52 (Weimar: Böhlau), pp. 444–50

Steiger, Johann A. 2020. ‘“Nulla femina dir gleich”. Martin Luther und Maria: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Ikonographie des Schutzmantels’, in Maria in den Konfessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit. ed. by Bernhard Jahn and Claudia Schindler (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 25–63