 Hi everybody! Welcome to Barn's Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Claren, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barnes Foundation. Today I'm going to talk about this portrait right here, this small portrait on the south wall of room 14. So this painting is of Frederick the Wise, who was the elector of Saxony. It was painted in about 1525 by the artist Lucas Kronach the Elder. Lucas Kronach the Elder was born in 1472 and he takes his name from his birthplace of Kronach, which was part of the bishopric of Bamberg. His father, Hans Mahler, was an artist and it's assumed that he was Kronach's first teacher. Although the exact date of his appointment isn't known, Kronach was employed at the court of Frederick the Wise, so the sitter of this painting at Wittenberg by April 1505. During his time as a court painter he created paintings, murals, decorations for different Ducal residences throughout the area. He was the head of a workshop which included his sons, Hans and Lucas the Younger, as well as many other apprentices and journeymen. Over 400 paintings have been attributed to him and his workshop, so he was a very prolific painter. In 1508 Frederick the Wise granted him a coat of arms depicting a serpent with upright bat wings holding a ring in its mouth. If we zoom in right here, behind the shoulder of the elector, we can see that depicted right there. The winged serpent probably had humanistic or hieroglyphic significance and could also stand for Kronos, the Greek god of time, which was a pun on the artist's name in Latin as well as German. From 1508 onward he used this as a signature on his paintings. After 1534 the serpent's wings are those of a bird and they're shown folded. So we zoom back out. The artist was a friend of Martin Luther who lived in Tottenbittenberg under the protection of the electors of Saxony. Lucas Kronach and his workshop produced a great number of portraits of Luther, his wife and other reformers, as well as paintings of Protestant themes. But he was largely employed by the electors of Saxony, which he did for most of his life, continuing to work for the successors of Frederick, Johann the Steadfast, and Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous. So it makes sense then that today we're talking about a portrait of one of these electors. This painting is thought to be possibly a simplified version of another of Frederick by Kronach, which is now in Darmstadt. The other version painted in 1527 is shown, it shows the sitter in waist length, at waist length, and includes Frederick's coat of arms. However, we also see that it resembles many other portraits of Frederick. Our painting lacks any coat of arms, however, which would have helped to identify the sitter to somebody who didn't recognize his visage, who didn't know who he was, because these paintings were often commissioned for others to see, not necessarily to be shown in a place where the person might understand who the sitter is. The coat of arms is shown in a majority of other paintings and woodcuts of the sitter. However, because of its similarities to these other depictions of him, we can infer that it is Frederick the Wise. He's usually shown with the same kind of shirt, white shirt with collar and the black below, and then in a fur-lined cloak and that kind of funny-looking black floppy hat. He's also usually shown with hair very similar to this and a beard like this as well, sometimes of different color, maybe a little bit wider as he got older or gray. But it's because we see so many of the same kind of type of painting, a portrait of him, it's likely that Kronach made a careful study of Frederick in older age, which he then used as a template for both paintings and prints in the later years of Frederick's life and after his death. Frederick's successors commissioned posthumous paintings of the former elector, as both tributes to him and as propaganda, displaying the legitimacy of the current elector's rule through that of the legitimacy of the former ruler. So this painting was created around 1525, so it's possible that it could have been posthumous, but it also might have been done just prior to his death. Kronach was known for his large workshop, as I discussed, which may have taken on portraits like these based off of that sort of model or template that we talked about. So therefore, our image might show the standard workshop practice of using assistance in producing a specific type of portrait the artist was known for and one that he painted often. The artist emblem above his shoulder shows that the artist definitely claimed ownership and responsibility for its quality, so we know that he accepted this as his own. I've discussed before that the workshop practice of employing assistance and apprentices does not mean to diminish or compromise an attribution by an artist, but rather it highlights how paintings were created at the time and that the work of many hands was still meant to represent that one artist. In this case, Lucas Kronach, the elder. I hope that you enjoyed taking a bit of a closer look at this painting and learning a little bit more about Lucas Kronach. If you have any questions or comments below, please feel free to leave them. Thank you again for watching. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.