Christ and the Adulteress (Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery)

Object label:

Lucas Cranach the Younger German, Wittenberg and Weimar (1515-1586) Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, after 1537, Oil on panel Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.484

Lucas Cranach the Younger was trained by, and worked alongside, his famous father Cranach the Elder, who served as court painter to the Electors of Saxony and often used his art to promote the Protestant cause of his friend Martin Luther. At the Elder's death in 1553, Cranach the Younger inherited his busy workshop and carried his father's style into the late sixteenth century. With its broadly modeled figures and bright colors flatly applied, the schematic design of the painting here typifies the Cranach shop style - a style intended to convey narrative as simply and directly as possible. As told in John 8:2-11, the Pharisees, hoping to trap Jesus in an intellectual double bind, confronted him with an adulterous woman and demanded she be killed for her crime as dictated by the law of Moses. Jesus deflected their challenge by answering, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." (That text, in German, is inscribed along the painting's upper edge.) Filled with shame, the defeated Pharisees dispersed. Cranach depicts the story's climax: As the Pharisees clamor for an answer, Christ points compassionately at the adulteress and forgives her sin. Luther himself preached on the theme of Christ and the adulteress, reminding his listeners that any sinner, if repentant, could be forgiven in "the kingdom of Christ."

[http://collection.chrysler.org/emuseum/copyright/7565?t:state:flow=442ca83a-10eb-4cb0-a3f7-1e2180b204b0] (accessed 14.04.2014)