Lucas Cranach, the Elder (German, 1472–1553), Saint Helena with the Cross, 1525, oil on panel, Cincinnati Art Museum, Bequest of Mary M. Emery, 1927.387.

Audio Description

This painting, Saint Helena with the Cross, was made in 1525 by the German artist Lucas Cranach, the Elder, who lived from 1472 to 1553. It is an oil painting on panel and was bequeathed to the Cincinnati Art Museum by Mary M. Emery. Its accession number is 1927.387. A small, vertical painting, about 16 inches in height, presents a young woman in three-quarter length, holding a large wooden cross against a black background, filling the composition. Her right arm is wrapped around the vertical element of the tao (or capital T)-shaped wooden cross. Her left hand rests on her belly. She tilts her head toward the cross while gazing directly out of the picture at the viewer. The horizontal beam of the cross cuts diagonally across the left corner above her head. She wears an elaborately decorated dress with a dark red velvet skirt, a bodice of embroidered burnt orange fabric with a white stomacher held by dark laces. The long sleeves of the dress are a made of alternating bands of red velvet and the embroidered fabric with flaring cuffs that fall over the woman’s leather gloved hands. Her blond hair is gathered in a hairnet decorated with pearls. She wears a gold crow, jeweled collar and two heavy gold chains. The artists monograph and the date 1525 are painted prominently in the upper right corner.

Label Copy

This painting, Saint Helena with the Cross, was made in 1525 by the German artist Lucas Cranach, the Elder, who lived from 1472 to 1553. It is an oil painting on panel and was bequeathed to the Cincinnati Art Museum by Mary M. Emery. Its accession number is 1927.387.

Alongside Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach was one of the major artists of the German High Renaissance. Cranach developed a highly distinctive style of painting, often characterized by bold, intense colors, flattened forms, and meticulously detailed costumes. In this small panel, Cranach depicts Saint Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, in the elegant dress and elaborate jewelry of a sixteenth-century noblewoman.

Three works by Cranach were among the paintings sent to Washington, D.C. in 1945: Portrait of a Lawyer’s Wife, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, and Lucretia, a depiction of an ancient Roman heroine. The three represent the range of subjects in the prolific artist’s body of work. Among the “202,” Cranach’s paintings joined works by Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Hans Baldung Grien to create a rich array of early-sixteenth-century German art.

Back to The Berlin Masterpieces in America     Back to the Audio Exhibition