He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced with enthusiasm.

He learned the art of drawing from his father Hans Maler (his surname meaning "painter" and denoting his profession, not his ancestry, after the manner of the time and class).

The records of Wittenberg confirm Gunderam's statement to this extent: that Cranach's name appears for the first time in the public accounts on the 24 June 1504, when he drew 50 gulden for the salary of half a year, as pictor ducalis ("the duke's painter").

Early in his career he was active in several branches of his profession: sometimes a decorative painter, more frequently producing portraits and altarpieces, woodcuts, engravings, and designing the coins for the electorate.

[3] Early in the days of his official employment he startled his master's courtiers by the realism with which he painted still life, game and antlers on the walls of the country palaces at Coburg and Locha; his pictures of deer and wild boar were considered striking, and the duke fostered his passion for this form of art by taking him out to the hunting field, where he sketched "his grace" running the stag, or Duke John sticking a boar.

[3] Before 1508 he had painted several altar-pieces for the Castle Church at Wittenberg in competition with Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair and others; the duke and his brother John were portrayed in various attitudes and a number of his best woodcuts and copper-plates were published.

Cranach, like his patron, was friendly with the Protestant Reformers at a very early stage; yet it is difficult to fix the time of his first meeting with Martin Luther.

This accounts for the comparative unproductiveness as painters of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, and also may explain why Cranach was not especially skilled at handling colour, light, and shade.

It is characteristic of Cranach's prolific output, and a proof that he used a large workshop, that he received payment at Wittenberg in 1533 for "sixty pairs of portraits of the elector and his brother" on one day.

To the left God produces the tables of the law, Adam and Eve taste the forbidden fruit, the serpent raises its head, and punishment manifests in the shape of death and the realm of Satan.

His best known work in this vein was a series of prints for the pamphlet Passional Christi und Antichristi,[9] where scenes from the Passion of Christ were matched by a print mocking practices of the Catholic clergy, so that Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple was matched by the Pope, or Antichrist, signing indulgences over a table spread with cash (see gallery below).

The iconography is original and unusual: Christ is shown twice, to the left trampling on Death and Satan, to the right crucified, with blood flowing from the lance wound.

"[3] Cranach was equally successful in a series of paintings of mythological scenes which nearly always feature at least one slim female figure, naked but for a transparent drape or a large hat.

These subjects were produced early in his career, when they show Italian influences including that of Jacopo de' Barberi, who was at the court of Saxony for a period up to 1505.

[11] Humour and pathos are combined at times in pictures such as Jealousy (Augsburg, 1527; Vienna, 1530), where women and children are huddled into groups as they watch the strife of men wildly fighting around them.

[13] Cranach's "Cupid Complaining to Venus" passed through in Hitler's personal collection, causing the National Gallery to research its history, suspecting that it may have been looted.

[14][15] The diptych Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder has been the focus of a legal dispute between the heirs of the former owner, Dutch art collector Jacques Goudstikker, and the Norton Simon museum in California.

The museum hired a private provenance researcher, Laurie Stein, to investigate the circumstance of the sale in 1934, and she concluded that the Cranach had not been sold under duress by the Jewish owners.

[20] In April 2021 Cranach's "The Resurrection" was sold at auction following a settlement between the heirs of Holocaust victim Margarete Eisenmann and the art dealer Eugene Thaw.

[21] After being looted, the Cranach had been consigned to Sothebys by Hans Lange and passed through Hugo Perls and Knoedler Galleries before being acquired by Eugene Thaw.

A painting by a follower of Lucas Cranach the Elder titled Lamentation and completed in the 1530s, which had been looted from Poland in 1946, was returned to the National Museum, Wrocław in 2022.