First commandment: You shall believe in one God

This artist, who without doubt trained in the Cranach family workshop, belongs to a generation of artists that no longer concentrated on the production of altarpieces, but was flexible and executed various tasks. He might be Hans (Johannes) Maler who until 1535 was responsible for designing the annual 'Johannisspiele' in Dresden. An earlier attempt to attribute the initials 'GB' on the coat of arms to Gregor Byners - a Cranach apprentice mentioned as active in Schneeberg - can no longer be verified as the records have been lost, but it would seem more plausible that the initials are those of Gregor Byner, the mayor in office at the time and a person who would have exercised considerable influence on the commission. The sixth panel shows the coat of arms of the last catholic priest Pleban Dr. Peter Eyssenberg (P D P E).

In 1530 Johann Moler of Dresden registered his son as 'Valten molers' (Valentin Elner?), an event witnessed by four Freiberg citizens. [1] Whether he was the creator of the ten commandment panels and his father the Cranach apprentice to whom we have already attributed paintings in Zwickau, Rochlitz, Döbeln and Grimma must remain a hypothetical. It is however conceivable that the son followed in his father's footsteps.

A certain stylistic similarity to the Dresden ten commandment panels can be recognized in two images originally from the Riesaer monastery church, but were lost during the Second World War. They depicted the scenes of Christ in the Temple and the Flight into Egypt and were the recto and verso of a panel that had been split.[2]

[1] from Thieme/Becker

[2]Hentschel 1973, No. 343

[Sandner 1993, 315-316]

The painter Johann or Hans from Dresden represented the world of renaissance bourgoise life in the 'Ten commandments' cycle he painted for the Kreuzkirche in 1528/29. The former apprentice to Lucas Cranach the Elder combined a depiction of the fundamental maxim of jewish and christian religion with the representation of contemporary landscapes, streets, interiors and daily scenes. When reformation beliefs were introduced to the dukedom of Saxony in 1539 the paintings disappeared into the attic of the town hall. The most probable reason for this was that traces of the old faith were visible in some of the paintings.

[Städtische Galerie Dresden, revised 2015]