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The J. Paul Getty Museum has recently acquired an oil painting on panel by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the foremost artists of the German Renaissance. A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion was made at the height of Cranach's career, demonstrating the artist's imaginative subject matter and meticulous style.
The painting depicts a landscape with mythical figures representing both the wild and civilized traits of mankind. A slain lion lies on its side with its tongue hanging out and eyes fixed in a blank stare. Blood spills from its mouth and nostrils. The lion rests at the foot of a faun, who sits on a rock in the middle of a clearing. Aside from his pointed ears, everything about the faun—his physique, posture, and countenance—appears human. He seems to express concern and weariness as he gazes toward his family. A thick forest isolates the fauns from a distant village and castle set in a stunning, mountainous landscape.
A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion is especially remarkable for its strong composition and the artist's fine rendering of detail. It was made at a time when German painting flourished—between the late fifteenth and seventeenth centuries—as artists such as Cranach, Martin Schongauer, and Albrecht Dürer began to incorporate into their work direct observations from nature.
A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion enhances the Museum's small but select group of German Renaissance paintings, which includes Schongauer's Madonna and Child in a Window and Hans Hoffman's A Hare in the Forest.
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