Attributed to the Krems Workshop

For about 60 years the Belvedere displayed this small winged altarpiece in a rearranged form that hid an empty shrine. It had entered Vienna's museum of applied arts, today the MAK, in 1872 with a carved Coronation of the Virgin in the centre that fitted neither its style nor its size. When the altar moved to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1940 and to the Belvedere in 1953, that group was catalogued separately, and in the early 1960s the painted outer panels were taken off the wings and mounted in front of the empty shrine.

While preparing a 2021 exhibition on the age of Dürer in Austria, the curators put the paintings back on the outside and went looking for the missing figure. They found a candidate in the museum's own holdings, a seated crowned woman with a notch under her right hand that probably once held a sword. Matching holes, the same limewood and close tree-ring dates support the fit, and the sword points to Saint Catherine.

The paintings on the outer wings give the altar its nickname. They illustrate the fourth chapter of the Song of Songs, with the bride and bridegroom read as figures of Mary and Christ, apparently after a Netherlandish block book of around 1465, and the scholar Peter Krenn called the ensemble the Song of Songs Altarpiece. No carver or painter is recorded. The Renaissance columns and the parallel folds of the drapery tie it to altarpieces made around 1520 in Vienna and Lower Austria, and above all to one from the Piarist church in Krems on the Danube, hence the workshop's name.