Attributed to Rueland Frueauf the Elder

The word attributed matters here. The Belvedere keeps a panel of Christ wearing the crown of thorns, painted around 1495, which specialists connect with Rueland Frueauf the Elder without treating the case as closed. It sits among a group of late Gothic pictures from Salzburg and Passau where the hands of a master, his family and the painters around him are hard to separate. The anonymous Master of Grossgmain, for example, is linked to Frueauf's workshop in a way scholars still debate.

Frueauf himself is a documented person, recorded in Salzburg and Passau between 1470 and 1507, and counted among the leading late Gothic painters in the German-speaking lands. Nearly all his secure work is in the Belvedere, above all eight large altar panels made around 1490 for a church in Salzburg, with the life of the Virgin on the weekday faces and the Passion of Christ on the faces shown on feast days. His son, Rueland Frueauf the Younger, also became a painter and made altarpieces for the abbey of Klosterneuburg near Vienna.