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Portrait of Hans Luther, Luther's father
Historical Context
The Portrait of Hans Luther (c.1527) at the Wartburg-Stiftung captures Luther's father — Hans Luder, a miner who had scraped together the resources for his son Martin's legal education at Erfurt — in the year of his visit to Wittenberg. Hans Luther had initially opposed his son's entry into the Augustinian order and the abandonment of a legal career; Martin Luther later dedicated his major treatise The Freedom of a Christian to his father as a gesture of reconciliation. By 1527, aged perhaps sixty, Hans Luther was a respected if modest figure in the Mansfeld copper-mining community. Cranach's portrait of him — a relatively humble subject compared to the electoral princes and cardinals he typically painted — reflects both Luther's wish to honor his parents and Cranach's role as the documentary painter of the entire Reformation circle. The Wartburg-Stiftung's holding is particularly apt: the Wartburg was where Luther translated the New Testament in 1521-22.
Technical Analysis
The portrait follows established conventions of the period, with attention to physiognomic features and costume details that convey social identity and status.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice Hans Luther's working-man's hands and face: Cranach documents the physical evidence of a life spent in the practical industry of mining, not the softer life of scholarship or court.
- ◆Look at the Wartburg-Stiftung location: the fortress most associated with Luther's translation of the New Testament now holds the portrait of his father — a poignant juxtaposition of son's intellectual achievement and father's practical world.
- ◆Observe the direct gaze of a man accustomed to giving orders: Hans Luther was a successful entrepreneur who commanded workers, and his portrait projects that authority.
- ◆The pendant relationship with the Margaretha Luther portrait allows the couple to be seen together as they would have appeared in life.
