Master of the Divisio Apostolorum

In 1494 a painter in Styria, in the southeast of today's Austria, showed the apostles parting from one another before they set out to preach across the world. Latin calls the subject the Divisio Apostolorum. The panel came from the Benedictine abbey of Admont and is now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, and it gave its anonymous painter his name.

His style gathers several currents that reached Styria in those years, from Netherlandish, Franconian and Salzburg painting. He also borrowed from the Master of the Schotten Altarpiece in Vienna and from compositions by the engraver Martin Schongauer. A Virgin with the Fourteen Holy Helpers in the Joanneum museum in Graz is given to him as well.

The Belvedere holds two panels from a cycle on the life of the Virgin, painted on spruce around 1490 to 1495. One shows her birth, the other the meeting of her parents, Joachim and Anne, at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. The Meeting reached the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1923 as a gift from Baron Hugo von Grundherr of Munich.