Law and Grace (Prague)

The left half (sub lege) depicts the stories of the Old Testament: the kneeling Moses receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai; Adam and Eve under the Tree of Knowledge; the camp of the Israelites who have defied God and are dying after being bitten by venomous snakes; a pole with the raised-up serpent in the desert – the bronze serpent that protected those who looked up to it; and an open tomb with a dead person as the symbol of death.

John the Baptist, who is turning to the man from the right-hand side of the picture, shows the Lamb of God with a Heraldic flag – the symbol of salvation.

The resurrected Jesus stands in the foreground and he crushes underfoot the serpent and a human skeleton as symbols of the devil and death.

In his work De Servo Arbitrio (1525), Martin Luther bases his ideas on the Letter of Paul to the Romans and explains his concept more specifically.

The first similar depiction is Cranach's illustration for the title page of Luther’s work Auslegung der Evangelien vom Advent bis cum Ostern (1528, Wittenberg) that corresponds with the Prague picture, which is one of two surviving early types.

The updated version of the original composition, that Lucas Cranach the Younger also worked on, also includes the Pope among the sinners in the flames of hell.

Luther and Melanchton are likewise portrayed as apostles on the retable of the castle church in Dessau (1565) and Cranach the Younger brings them wine.