Master of the Krainburg Altarpiece

The parish church of Kranj, a town in today's Slovenia that German speakers called Krainburg, is dedicated to three Roman siblings, Cantius, Cantianus and Cantianilla. Legend says they fled persecution in Aquileia, the Roman city at the head of the Adriatic, around the year 300, and were caught and beheaded. Around 1510 an unnamed painter told their story on the wings of the church's high altar, and scholars have named him after that commission ever since.

Two of those wings are in the Belvedere in Vienna. Opened, they show the siblings' flight and their martyrdom. Closed, they showed Christ praying on the Mount of Olives and the Resurrection. The painter seems to have been active in southern Styria from about 1500, and his vivid colour and Netherlandish touches suggest he had travelled through the Low Countries and the Lower Rhine. His landscape backgrounds, with a distinctive rendering of Jerusalem, are how further panels in Graz, Strasbourg and Chicago have been linked to his hand.

The imperial picture gallery in Vienna acquired the two Krainburg wings in 1886, and they passed to the Belvedere in 1953.