Attributed to Master MS

In 1506 a painter signed the high altarpiece of Saint Catherine's church in Selmecbánya, today Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia, with two letters, M and S, on the rim of Christ's tomb in the Resurrection scene. The altarpiece was later taken apart, and its panels are now divided between Esztergom, Budapest, Lille and a village church in Slovakia. They count among the finest panel paintings of their time from the Kingdom of Hungary, yet the man behind the monogram has never been securely identified. Proposed names include Marten Schwarz, linked to the Kraków altarpiece of the sculptor Veit Stoss, and most recently a Vienna painter called Michel Schröter.

That last proposal came with a larger argument. In 2025 an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest suggested that Master MS kept a workshop in Vienna from the early 1500s and assigned several new works to him there.

One of them is the Belvedere's epitaph for Alexius Funck, mayor of Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna. In his will of 1515 Funck asked his wife to set up a memorial to him in the town's cathedral. The panel, painted on fir around 1522, shows the Death of the Virgin, with Funck, his family and their patron saints in the lower part. The Belvedere now lists it as attributed to Master MS, while the caption on its own photographs still names the painter only as a Wiener Neustadt master.