The Legend of Saint John Chrysostom,

1509

This is the largest and most elaborate of Cranach’s engravings. The richly detailed landscape provides the setting for the apocryphal legend of one of the Greek Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom, who lived as a hermit before becoming a preacher and archbishop. During that time, he had intercourse with a princess in his cave, before throwing her off a cliff. Shunned by the church, he resolved to repent by crawling on all fours in the wilderness—as seen in the background of Cranach’s composition. After many years he was forgiven, and the princess was discovered to be alive at the bottom of a ravine, with the child whom she had conceived with John. In Cranach’s imaginative interpretation, the princess is represented as a nursing mother with her infant son, oblivious to the penitential father.