Around 1500, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) stepped onto the world stage in Vienna. This volume explores the artist's earliest period of work and presents all the paintings he produced during this time. The expressiveness of these early paintings differs radically from the courtly elegance of the compositions he later produced as a court painter in Wittenberg. These brilliant paintings, drawings, and woodcuts document both the thirty-year-old's close contacts with the humanist circles of Konrad Celtis and Johannes Cuspinian and identify him as a precursor of the so-called Danube School.