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CRANACH, Lucas the Elder: Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon

🖼 Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon, 1520-23
Oil and tempera on limewood
90 × 60 cm
Frankfurt, Germany

Glowing gold leaf frames the Virgin cradling Christ above a crescent moon, rendered in Cranach's precise Northern Renaissance style. This iconic image synthesized medieval devotion with humanist ideals, becoming a bestselling woodcut that shaped Protestant visual culture across sixteenth-century Germany.

The story of art
The story of art
E. H. Gombrich
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