The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly acquired depiction of St. Maurice may be the most dazzling, if not quite the best, painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder in its collection. And though its label indicates the presence of studio hands, as was increasingly true of Cranach’s work after 1520, there is little to indicate any diminution of this German master’s habitual vigor.

The left wing of a polyptych from about 1523, this oil-on-panel is a full-length image of St. Maurice as a moor. The Egyptian saint was canonized because, as a legion commander in the third century, he refused to slaughter the Christians in Gaul. One of the reasons for this commission was likely the exemplary piety of its patron, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545), archbishop-elector of Mainz. Another reason, less spiritual perhaps, was the latter’s desire to immortalize a nifty and newly acquired suit of silver armor in his extensive collection of brica-brac: Encrusted with gold, pearls and gemstones, it adorned a life-size statue of the saint . In Cranach’s depiction, surely, there is no great psychological insight, a quality that was never especially important to him in any case. The saint is swallowed whole by his suit, which almost radiates out of the panel that contains it. Though its silver and partial gilt partake of the slightly abstracted quality that Cranach often imparts to his subjects, the more you look at the suit, the colder, harder, and more real it seems to become.

Despite his sundry charms, Cranach (1472–1553) is not the easiest artist to love. In the history of art appreciation, it is unlikely that he was ever selected as anyone’s favorite painter. Take, for instance, this well-intentioned tribute by the humanist scholar Christoph Scheurl: “If I exclude the inimitable Albrecht Dürer … then, in my opinion, this century must accord you the highest rank.”

There are several reasons why this resident of Wittenberg and long-standing friend of Martin Luther may not enjoy the reputation of Dürer. First, few people in the history of art equal the great Nuremberg artist, who transcends his age and his nation in a way that Cranach does not. As important, however, is that Cranach was always a far more eclectic artist, shifting on a moment’s notice from the phosphorescent mannerism of the Danube School, especially in his early Viennese works, to the evocative realism of the Met’s own “Man with a Gold-Embroidered Cap.” In sentiment, he vacillates between the bejeweled piety of the Met’s “Martyrdom of Saint Barbara” and the outright profaneness of its “Judgment of Paris,” in which three nubile goddesses display their charms like voguing dancers.

As a result, it is difficult to form a coherent sense of Cranach’s career, compared with the far more legible trajectory of Dürer’s. All the competing strains of German art in the first half of the 16th century show up in his work, together with some Italian influence, and it is hard to attribute to him any painterly conviction for which, figuratively speaking, he would go to the mat.

Perhaps the reason for this is that, in 16th-century Germany, where humanism had not yet permeated to the same degree as it had in Italy, painting itself was still seen more as a craft than as a liberal art. Though Cranach was a fine painter, he did not have Dürer’s abstract reverence for the medium. Clearly a man of great intelligence, Cranach, like so many craftsman of his day, wanted to make money.

This he accomplished to such a degree that he may have become richer from the art of painting than any man before Pablo Picasso. By the end of his life, this son of a little-known painter was the mayor and richest landowner in Wittenberg. In addition, he was a full-time publisher and apothecary of such success that he often fobbed off on studio hands the commissions he received as court painter to the electors of Saxony. (Some of these commissions, by the way, required his painting the princes’ kitchens and sleighs.) To Cranach, it was all in a day’s work. Yet when the artist truly applied himself, he could propel himself to a lapidary brilliance of detail that approached calligraphy, and to a fresh, dazzling flatness in the paint itself that was unsurpassed among the artists of his age. Both of these virtues are present to a striking degree in the Metropolitan’s St. Maurice.