Lucas Cranach the Elder would have felt right at home in Frankfurt, a city where vast quantities of money are made, managed, traded and spent. His Wittenberg factory churned out paintings and woodcuts by the dozen, becoming the region's market leader for altarpieces and murals and making Cranach the most productive artist of the 16th century. On top of all that, he handled public-relations campaigns for Martin Luther, bought and sold real estate and had a bookstore, a publisher and a pharmacy that sold wine. In an impressive exhibition opening today, Frankfurt's Staedel Museum aims to prove he was a great artist as well as a successful one, at least as good as his contemporary Albrecht Duerer. Cranach's Weimar gravestone describes him as the fastest painter. The quality of his work doesn't get a mention. A lot of his paintings survive, yet it is sometimes difficult to differentiate those by Cranach (1472-1553) from those by his underlings. The Staedel set out to find the best from the hand of the master, scouring 50 or so collections from Warsaw to Florida. The result: 113 works across a huge range, including landscapes, religious paintings, nudes, sword tournaments and courtly portraits. His scope was in fact even broader. Few of the festive decorations, murals or tablecloths he produced as court painter to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony have survived. Cranach was born in the town of Kronach, from which he took his name. Little is known of his life until 1501, when he went to Vienna. He became court painter in Wittenberg in 1505. Perugino Parallel His work suggests that he visited both the Netherlands and Italy, soaking up influences from artists there. To make that point, the Staedel has hung a Perugino Madonna with the infant John the Baptist and Jesus next to two by Cranach. The similarities are striking -- the babies in both artists' work have eerily adult facial expressions. The Madonnas are both childlike and serene. Serenity, though, isn't a catchword of Cranach's early work. In this respect he is unlike Duerer. The bodies hanging on crosses in Cranach's early Calvary depictions are gnarled and slumped -- there is no languid grace in their pain. Instead of pristine circles of light, halos are spiked and crackling with energy. He does gory, too -- "The Beheading of John the Baptist" (circa 1515) shows a decapitated body with blood gushing out of the neck in terrifying spurts as the executioner hands John's head on a plate to Salome. Adding to the gruesomeness, a dog sniffs at the pool of blood forming on the ground. Chopped Heads Cranach's women are otherworldly -- inscrutable with slanted eyes and childlike faces apparently untouched by the cares of the world. Some are cunning and conspiratorial, probably because they have just chopped off a head, or are poised to eat a forbidden apple. Others appear saintly and pure. Yet they nearly all look as though they were swapped for the children of elves at birth. These idealized, erotic long-limbed nudes with their elfin faces inspired Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Take the flirtatious "Venus"(1532). She is loosely dangling the slinkiest sliver of a see-through veil -- clothing designed for provocation, not modesty. She observes the viewer through knowing, narrowed eyes, captured in the act of seduction. The exceptions to these stylized figures are the portraits of real people, somehow more human and sympathetic. Among the most intimate are the paintings of Luther's aged parents, their characters and experiences etched on their faces. Both combine kindness with strength of purpose as well as pride with a past life that has had its fair share of anxiety as well as success. Luther's PR Man Luther, a former monk, married the former nun Katharina von Bora in 1525. Cranach took over the propaganda for this scandalous marriage, producing a series of as many as 1,000 paintings of the happy couple. The portraits were hugely popular. So was Cranach as good as Duerer? His figures are not as anatomically correct. A comparison of the two artists' depictions of Adam and Eve shows Duerer's to be more accurate, while Cranach's Adam has ears that are almost under his chin and forearms that are much too thin for his biceps. Yet there is a stark energy to Cranach's work that has persisted in German art. He combines it with a fascination for the bleaker, cruder side of life and is more focused on expressing internal truths about his subjects than creating outward beauty. Those tendencies recur. You only have to think of Kirchner's prostitutes with their elongated faces, Otto Dix's hideous images of the war wounded or Max Ernst's disturbed, raging monsters. The exhibition runs through Feb. 17, 2008, and will travel to London's Royal Academy. The main sponsors are Commerzbank AG and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.