Follower of Lucas Cranach the Elder

Panels filed under this name in the Belvedere were painted by someone working in the manner of Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Saxon court painter, whose own name has not come down to us. The museum places them in Austria around 1510 to 1520, painted on fir, and catalogues them as the work of a follower.

That Austrian setting makes sense. Before he entered the service of the Elector of Saxony, Cranach spent the years around 1502 to 1505 in Vienna, and his vivid early pictures from that stay left a mark on painters along the Danube.

One panel, about a metre high, shows Christ seated and waiting while the cross is made ready, a devotional theme known in German as Christ in Distress. A smaller one shows Saint Erasmus, the martyr bishop venerated as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Both belonged to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the larger one as a 1922 gift from the Viennese art dealer Moritz Lindemann, and both passed to the Belvedere in 1990.