Mercenary Love

Baldung's Mercenary Love from 1527 is a moralizing genre scene depicting the exchange of affection for payment—the young woman who offers or withholds love in proportion to financial reward—a subject with a long tradition in German and Flemish moralizing painting. Mercenary love subjects allowed painters to combine the depiction of female beauty with moral commentary on the corruption of love by commercial calculation, appealing simultaneously to the eye and to the moralizing sensibility of Protestant reform culture. Baldung's version brings his characteristic psychological intensity to the subject, and the 1527 date—during the Peasants' War and the Reformation crisis—places it in a period of acute social stress when traditional sexual and economic relationships were being fundamentally questioned. His Mercenary Love subjects demonstrate the range of secular moralizing content his workshop produced alongside devotional painting.

The genre scene is rendered with Baldung's characteristic directness, the transactional nature of the encounter depicted with unflinching moral commentary.