Master of the Martyrdoms of Saints

Blessed Thiemo was an archbishop of Salzburg who joined the crusade of 1101, was taken prisoner in Asia Minor, and died in captivity, later to be honoured as a martyr. A small panel in the Belvedere shows his death, and it gave an anonymous painter his name. Scholars call him the Master of the Martyrdoms of Saints, after this scene and a companion panel with the martyrdom of a bishop, most likely Saint Erasmus.

He worked in Vienna in the years around 1495 to 1500. A third surviving panel, showing Margrave Leopold the Third and the founding legend of Klosterneuburg Abbey, belongs with the other two, and the set was probably painted for that monastery just north of Vienna. In style he follows the Master of the Schottenaltar, the anonymous painter of a major Viennese altarpiece of 1469, and he is counted among the forerunners of the Danube School, the painters who soon gave landscape a new weight in German art.

The Thiemo panel is only 53 centimetres high. Its outer face shows three kneeling women, the donors who paid for the work. It once belonged to the princes of Liechtenstein, was given to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1922, and now hangs with the Belvedere's medieval collection in the former Palace Stables of the Lower Belvedere.