The Silver Age

Representing history is always a product of the present. Indeed, Cranach’s painting does not try to illustrate a remote past realistically. Rather the painting becomes an imaginative act that reveals much about how contemporaries might have understood themselves in terms of categories of the civilised and the primitive.

The oppositions here rely on the interplay between the pictorial and the real: the (possible) setting of the painting in a lavishly furnished room versus the wild and bushy setting in the painting, the clothed and educated beholder versus the violent, ignorant and unclothed people in the painting. These oppositions are also maintained now and affect us as beholders and the National Gallery as a setting.