The painting renders an elderly man embracing a young woman, to whom he offers a long chain with big golden links, while she pulls at his beard with both hands. Before the restoration of the work its appearance was dominated by shades of brown and ochre enlivened by the lighter surfaces of the flesh, which highlighted the characters, whose faces are treated superficially like theatrical masks to suggest a character type. A certain interest in the complexity of the characters’ inner life could be discerned only in the case of the man, an individual who may be defined as evil, lecherous and insincere. The woman’s physiognomy is less expressive, aiming to suggest a simple, insensitive and insincere character, easily manipulated by the man who exploits her greed. The artistic career of Lucas Cranach the Elder was not fully committed to the service of the Lutheran Reformation, even if the painter published and sold the writings of Martin Luther, of whom he was also a close friend [Canaday 1969, 317-318]. However, the explanation for the work’s "folk tinged realism", manifested in the satirical, almost caricatured rendering of the characters could according to Teodor Ionescu be the fact that the artist supported the ideas of the Reformation [Ionescu 1967, 53]. Indeed, the man who lures with riches might be the Devil, while the debauched woman may embody, in such a key, the Catholic Church, traditionally identified in Protestant sermons [Bilhartz 1986, 115; cf. LaHaye 1999, 262-271] with the Whore of Babylon, mentioned in St. John’s Revelation [Apocalypse, 17:1-18; 18]. Just the possibility to depict this well-known cliché of the Protestant confessionalized discourse as a genre scene appreciated by the audience could have been a very plausible reason for the painter’s interest in the subject of "The Ill-Matched Couple", which he addressed in many works. Even the moralizing themes are known to him, including the quite numerous works illustrating "the power of the women" (Weibermacht), a category which includes (in addition to the paintings with "The Ill-Matched Couple") those rendering Lot with his daughters, Hercules at Omphale and Aristotle with Phyllis, being therefore the echo of a misogynistic view, specific to that age.

[Dr. Alexandru Gh. Sonoc, Muzeul National Brukenthal, revised 2017]