This attractive book sheds light on a little-noticed patch of history: the symbiosis that developed between the artist Lucas Cranach the Elder and Martin Luther during the early years of the Reformation while at Wittenberg. The subject represents yet another departure for Steven Ozment, who in the course of his career has ranged broadly over the history of late medieval and early modern theology and religion as well as early modern social, family, and microhistory. With this book Ozment displays his considerable skills as a critic of art and a critic of the historiographical conventions of art historians, too.

Ozment's book details a truly extraordinary life. Born to a craftsman-like painter in the obscure town of Kronach in Upper Franconia in 1472, Lucas Maler, later Cranach, became one of the era's few successful northern painters who did not visit Italy or study the works of Italians. Little is known about his early years. His family was vindicated, though likely stained by a series of legal squabbles they had with another family in Kronach during Cranach's youth. In 1491–92 Lucas set out on a Wanderjahr in which he came into contact with the styles of the artists who would be among his chief competitors. It was not until after 1500 that his work began to attract attention when he completed a commission for the count of Coburg. Soon afterward Cranach left Kronach for Vienna, where he came into contact with the masterpieces of Dürer and the humanistic circle that surrounded the emperor.

Despite these influences Cranach soon developed his own unique style, and as a consequence, he was recommended to serve as a painter in the court of the Saxon Elector Frederick the Wise. By 1508 Frederick expressed his satisfaction by awarding Cranach a coat of arms emblazoned with a serpent, and in the following year, he trusted the painter with a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands, where the artist came into contact with the innovations that were then occurring in oil painting. In these years, too, the Cranach studio, printing press, and other business concerns (which included a pharmacy) all grew in Wittenberg, so that by the time of Luther's arrival in 1511, the artist was the town's wealthiest burgher. During the 1510s his fortunes continued to prosper; in 1518, the chief of several residences he owned in the town had eighty-four rooms and sixteen kitchens! His workshop, press, and other concerns employed scores of apprentices, journeyman, and laborers, who churned out art works, books, and broadsides.

Although this Horatio Alger story is interesting in and of itself, the chief contribution of Ozment's work lies in its careful reconstruction of Cranach's contributions to popularizing Luther and the Reformation. Successive chapters recount the ways in which Cranach granted a visual identity to Luther and to Luther's messages about the Gospel, family life, and sexuality. In contrast to previous work in the vein first pursued by Robert Scribner, Ozment sees the Reformation's use of visual imagery as new and innovative. The work of art historians, too, has long portrayed Cranach as an opportunistic chameleon, capable of working for Catholic and Protestant alike because he held few deep convictions. Ozment does not deny that Cranach frequently found employment on both sides of the developing confessional lines and that he was not above flattery and careerist ambition. Yet he shows that Cranach shared many of Luther's convictions and that it is possible to observe these shining through in the paintings he produced for the Wittenberg Movement from the 1520s to the 1540s. Here Ozment's exploration of Cranach's long-recognized eroticism is suggestive, since as he shows, that dimension of the artist's work is far more than amoral pornography. Instead Cranach's works from these years display both a healthy concern for the disruptive, darker side of human sexuality, even as they express a kind of innocent, Edenic embrace of sexual pleasure that was in harmony with Luther's notions about the rightful place sexual enjoyment should have in marriage.

Nearly everyone will find something of interest in this handsomely produced volume. Ozment shows himself here at once as both an accomplished and an opinionated scholar, and so many may also find something in this book with which to quibble. The overly easy dismissal of the works of Marxist and Neo-Marxist scholars of the Reformation with which the book opens may irritate some. And others may find that Ozment's persistent attempt to rehabilitate Cranach from the treatment of art historians such as Walter Friedländer and Leo Koerner ultimately fails to convince. In the mid-twentieth century Friedländer, in particular, argued that Cranach's early Viennese works represented the high point of the artist's achievement and that from this peak his art devolved steadily into mere craftsmanship. To be sure, Cranach's role as a popularizer of the Reformation, a movement that ultimately limited the opportunities available to the artist, likely conditioned Friedländer against the later works of Cranach. Yet Ozment's equally persistent efforts to restore Cranach to a place within the pantheon of the “great” sixteenth-century artists may not satisfy every reader, since he fails to step out of the traditions of scholarship in which connoisseurship, rather than historical context, is king.

And finally, one of the work's central contentions—that Cranach's and Luther's innovations were harbingers of bourgeois modernity—betrays the Whiggishness that has figured in some of Ozment's other studies. But even when such misgivings are taken into account, this enjoyable read is a bravura performance that demonstrates that its author might have had a brilliant career as an art historian, rather than as a scholar of religion and social history.