Master of the Adoration with the Bindenschild

The painter behind this name has no name at all. Art historians call him the Master of the Adoration with the Bindenschild after a single panel in the Belvedere, an Adoration of the Magi painted around 1490 on a board of fir. At the lower edge of the picture sits a small shield striped red, white and red. That is the Bindenschild, the arms of the Austrian duchy, and it gives the unknown artist both his label and a likely home in the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs.

Nothing about his life, his workshop or any other commission has come down to us. What survives is the panel itself, about 70 centimetres tall, with the three kings bringing their gifts to the Child. It hung in the imperial picture gallery in Vienna from 1783 and passed from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the city's great art museum, to the Belvedere in 1953, the year the Belvedere opened a museum of medieval Austrian art in its Orangery.