Workshop or close circle of Lucas Cranach the Elder Kronach 1472 - 1553 Weimar

Freiherr Bernhard von Hornstein, born 1761, who was married to Theresia Countess Preysing zu Alten-Preysing (1765-1804);
His estate and pictures, including the present lot, were sold in 1828 to an ancestor of the present owner;
Thence by descent.

This picture may have been painted as part of a cycle.  One other painting, of the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, on a similar eccentrically shaped panel of identical dimensions has long been considered as a pendant to it (private collection; here reproduced fig. 1).  Since the two subjects do not obviously form a pair, it seems likely that there were once other panels like them.

We are grateful to Ludwig Meyer for suggesting that these are by the same hand as two altarpiece wings in the Schloßkirche in Chemnitz depicting The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians and The Preaching of a Pope  (see I. Sandner, Spätgotische Tafelmalerei in Sachsen, Dresden/Basel 1993, pp. 174, 178, reproduced plates 40 a & b).  By the same hand is a panel of curious arched form comparable to the present one, but without the central indentation making it bilobate (if their parabolae were continued inward, they would form an identical shape to the present panel), depicting The Martyrdom of Saint James, also in the Schloßkirche, Chemnitz, and two further similar panels depicting The Virgin in Heaven with Saints and The Trinity, in the same church, which appear to the present writer to be by the same hand, though Sandner does not specifically link them with him (idem, reproduced p. 177).  The figure of God the Father in the latter panel is strikingly similar to the one in the present panel.  Sandner considers the first three to be the work of an independent pupil of Cranach, circa 1515.  Meyer agrees with the dating, but thinks it unlikely that this anonymous Cranach follower could have been an independent Master at this early date.