The Procuress

Cranach's Procuress (1548) at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi is one of his late moralizing genre scenes — a category of painting that allowed him to combine comic social observation with conventional moral instruction. The procuress was a stock figure of satirical literature and visual art: the old woman who facilitates illicit sexual commerce, her mediation between the young lovers simultaneously condemning all parties and providing the viewer with titillating observation. The subject had precedents in Netherlandish painting — Gerard ter Borch and later Jan Vermeer would treat it in the seventeenth century — and Cranach's version participates in the moralizing humor of humanist culture that simultaneously deplored folly and enjoyed its depiction. The work's presence in Tbilisi — a long way from its Wittenberg origins — reflects the complex circulation of Cranach's work through centuries of collecting, warfare, and dispersal. During the Napoleonic period and subsequent decades, many German and Central European paintings entered collections far removed from their origins, and Cranach's work is represented in institutional collections across the world from the United States to Japan.

Cranach's characteristic angular figures and precise linear style serve the moralizing narrative, with the contrasting ages and expressions of the three figures creating the painting's satirical point.