Heydenreich provides thorough scientific analyses of all material aspects, and while the results are intriguing, their most far-reaching effect is to show why the standard questions of connoisseurship hardly assist our understanding of the Cranach phenomenon. The paint, for example, seems to have been applied in a variety of ways: it might be a highly labor-intensive buildup of layers, or a more spontaneous wet-on-wet application known as alla prima, depending not so much on the hand of the artist or assistant but on the specifications of a given commission. The sophisticated organization of the studio was intended ultimately to achieve a style that was clearly recognizable and uniform, excluding the very distinction of different hands that is traditional connoisseurship’s chief area of investigation. Cranach obviously realized that such works as the paintings he produced during his early years in Vienna and during the very first years at the Wittenberg court could never be repeated by anybody else. The court’s demand for art could only be satisfied once he developed a style that was easier to imitate and a technique that was easier to replicate.

Impressive as these scholarly achievements are, they are not the real reason for the renewal of interest in the German Old Masters, one sign of which is the fact that this exhibition will be shown outside Germany. First, more time has passed since the dark and murderous years of National Socialism, when the notion of altdeutsch (referring to the golden age of German art in the late 15th and early 16th centuries) was readily subsumed under that of grossdeutsch (pertaining to Nazi notions of a "greater Germany") and the masters of the German Renaissance were appropriated by the fascist propaganda machine. More than three decades after the last major survey of Cranach’s art—held, tellingly, on the quasi-neutral ground of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1974—a younger generation of art historians seems to have less hesitation in addressing altdeutsche Kunst again.

And why Cranach? One answer might be found not in this exhibition’s sumptuous catalogue but in a little German/English booklet that was available in the Städel’s bookshop during the show. Titled Cranach the Entrepreneur, it contains brief descriptions of all the master’s business achievements: as a painter he was an innovator, as a court artist a Dienstleister (literally a "service provider") and as a publisher of Luther’s translation of the Bible a venture capitalist. He was also a real-estate investor, pharmacist, merchant, member of the city government for 10 years, three times mayor of Wittenberg, and, as a result of all this, one of the wealthiest people in town.

The catalogue of the Basel exhibition concludes with an interview with Joseph Beuys that was intended to show Cranach’s relevance in the 1970s. In 2008 the Renaissance master’s relevance is no longer provided by an artist/shaman who in his arte povera–like work tried to come to terms with his experiences during World War II. It can instead be found in the prefaces submitted by the two main sponsors of the exhibition, Commerzbank-Stiftung and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., which both stress Cranach’s qualities as a well-educated and successful businessman. After all, in our times savvy artist-entrepreneurs and their huge and busy workshops produce everything from shiny red hearts meant to dangle from lofty ceilings to diamond-encrusted skulls.

It seems, therefore, that every era is discovering its own Cranach. When art history was practiced by men of independent means in the early part of the 20th century, Cranach’s business savvy was sneered at. Then came the Nazis. Then the generation of 1968, looking for, in Beuys’s words, "chaotic elementary" tendencies in his art, "real alchemistic knowledge," and "a relationship to elementary spirits." Now that the age of Aquarius is long since over, Cranach the entrepreneur has been rediscovered—only this time the artist is being wholeheartedly embraced.

Armin Kunz is a managing partner of the Old Master prints and drawings dealership C.G. Boerner in New York.