Master of Heiligenkreuz

This painter is known only through a handful of small, precious panels. The name comes from a folding diptych that belonged to Heiligenkreuz, the Cistercian abbey in the Vienna Woods, until the abbey sold it to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1926. One wing shows the Annunciation, the other the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, and the figures have the spindly fingers and slender limbs that make this hand easy to recognise.

Where he came from is still argued over. In 1922 the art historian Betty Kurth proposed that he was French, and others have made him Austrian, German or Bohemian. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's exhibition of 2019 argued that he was trained in Paris around 1410, close to the illuminators of the French court, before moving east. His other works are scattered, with a Death of Saint Clare in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and a Death of the Virgin in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Belvedere's panel is a second, smaller Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, only about 21 by 18 centimetres and still in its original frame. The Christ Child places a ring on Catherine's finger. The museum bought it in 1995 from a Viennese dealer, after it had passed through collections in Budapest and Dortmund.