Master of the Presentations

Two of this painter's pictures in the Belvedere were once a single board. In the 1420s an unknown artist working in or near Vienna painted a wing for an altarpiece at Neukloster, the abbey in Wiener Neustadt south of the city. One face showed the Annunciation to Saint Anne, an angel telling the Virgin's mother that she will bear a child. The other face showed the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. At some later point the wing was sawn through its thickness so that each side could hang as a picture of its own, which is why the Presentation panel is less than a centimetre thick.

His real name is lost. Art historians call him the Master of the Presentations, after the temple scene that recurs in his work, and group other panels around him by style, in Vienna, Klosterneuburg and Berlin. He was active roughly from 1420 to 1435, in the last phase of the Soft Style, the graceful late Gothic manner of those years, and his figures and rooms show that he had studied Flemish painting and French book illumination. Both Neukloster panels came to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1927 and passed to the Belvedere in 1953.