Conrad Laib
1410 · Holy Roman Empire · Late Gothic
The story
The Crucifixion in the Belvedere is almost two metres square, and it is crowded. Around the crosses press soldiers, riders and onlookers, and on the blanket of a horse in the foreground are the remains of the painter's name. The panel is dated 1449 and once stood in the parish church of Salzburg, today the Franciscan church.
Conrad Laib was born around 1410 in Swabia and ran an important workshop in Salzburg from about 1445. He belonged to the first generation of painters in the German lands to take up the new realism of the Netherlandish masters, the style of Jan van Eyck and his circle, with weighty bodies and closely observed surfaces. The Salzburg Crucifixion carries that change onto a very large panel.
A second Crucifixion by him, dated 1457, is in Graz Cathedral, and after 1460 his trail is lost. The Vienna panel passed from the collection of the prince-archbishops of Salzburg to St Peter's Abbey, then to the imperial picture gallery in 1807, and entered the Belvedere in 1953.
