Museums all over the world, from Tokyo to Cleveland to Prague, include works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop in their permanent collections. Similarly, Cranach scholars form an international community, publishing in English, French, and German, as well as Slovenian, Romanian, and Portuguese, among other languages. The approximately 1,000 surviving paintings from Cranach's vast workshop help explain the wide dispersal of his work, as does the role he played in the invention of a new kind of art suited to Lutheran Reform, an international religious and social revolution that reverberated throughout the Christian world. Dirck Blübaum and Tobias Pfeifer-Helke's Die Cranachs: Die Werke des Staatlichen Museums Schwerin accompanies the 2017 exhibition Cranachs Luther in the Staatliches Museum Schwerin / Ludwigslust / Güstrow. This exhibition is one of many commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.

This slender, concise catalogue showcases the sixteen prints and thirteen paintings in the show, including polemical prints, epitaphs, and portraits of Martin Luther. The catalogue includes essays on Cranach the Elder, Cranach the Younger, and their productive workshop, as well as catalogue entries that trace the provenance of the images. The essay by Edgar Bierende, “Cranachs Luther im Bild” (Cranach's Luther in the Image) is the strongest in the collection. With a careful eye, the author analyzes the full-length portrait of Luther of 1546 (cat. no. 11), specifically noting the heroizing strategy of memorializing Luther in a Roman niche.

Although the essays and catalogue entries break no new ground, this volume offers a tidy, nicely packaged presentation of the fundamentals of the Cranach family's business practices and their relationship to the Lutheran Reformation. The text will be most useful to the non-specialist museum visitor. However, the minimal interpretation of the images and the insufficient acknowledgement of Cranach historiography will frustrate scholars and undermine the international importance of both the Lutheran Reformation and the Cranach workshop.

Like many of the German-language exhibition catalogues and monographs on Cranach that precede it, the Schwerin catalogue includes only German-language scholarship, and a non-representative selection of scholars at that. If the exhibition is intended for a local, German-speaking audience, the authors would have done well at least to allude to the scope and range of Cranach scholarship. If the audience is meant to be national or international, the exclusion of non-German research makes the exhibition and Cranach himself seem provincial. Furthermore, such myopic historiography creates the impression either of unfamiliarity with or indifference to research in languages other than German—or, worse, a belief that no creditable work on Cranach exists in any other language. The latter is particularly troubling given the hijacking of Cranach's reputation by earlier generations of scholars who misrepresented him as an exemplar of German nationalism.

For example, all relevant scholarship is omitted from the discussion of a lovely Madonna, dated cryptically to “post 1517” (cat. no. 9). The object's style and provenance are detailed, as are its formal similarities with Byzantine prototypes. The entry concludes with a declaration that Cranach served both Catholics and Protestants, on the presumption that any Madonna picture must by definition have been intended for a Catholic patron. Cranach of course painted Madonna panels for Protestant patrons throughout his career, as the research of the British art historian Bridget Heal and the American scholar Beth Kreitzer, among many others, has shown. During the Reformation, Cranach stopped painting Mariological images—i.e., those based on extra-biblical legend—but he recalibrated his Madonna pictures to abide by Luther's contention that the Virgin was a model of grace. This background explains the absence of a halo or other holy attribute. Such pared-down images were Cranach's cagey distillation of traditional iconography so that a panel such as the one in Schwerin could suit both Protestant and Catholic patrons.

One would also like to have seen this show in the context of other jubilee exhibitions—for instance, those commemorating the five hundredth birthday of Luther, in 1983, or the more recent work commemorating the birth of Cranach the Younger, in 1515.