After looking at this book and at Cranach:A Family of Master Painters by Schade, I recommend Schade for the larger selection of color pictures. Not that there is anything wrong with black and white, but you loose the vividness that was Cranach. Plus, I was looking for a reference for re-creating costume from this period, and its hard when everything is in shades of gray.

There is some overt ethnocentrism in Friedlander's Introduction that jeopordizes the quality of his analysis. He also spends more time despairing over the lack of quality in Cranach's latest work than he does really analyzing it in any depth or trying to explain the decline that he perceives. The catalogue is extremely thorough and helpful to anyone trying to get a sense of Cranach's works, this will be helpful to anyone planning on writing a monograph (and someone really should) on Cranach, less so to the Cranach enthusiast.

Slive's book is a basic introduction to the art of the Northern Netherlands during the Baroque era. It covers a wide range of artists and genres, but fails to consider the wide interpretative issues of the art. When Slive does attempt interpretation, he tends to fall back on old-fashioned methods that have since been disproved by modern scholarship. The prose is boring and bland, but the book does feature many photos (although more of them could be in color). Overall, an introductory text that covers a lot of ground but has little depth.