Master of the Saint Lambrecht Votive Altarpiece

Until about 1640, the abbey church of St Lambrecht in Styria kept a votive panel in which the Virgin spreads her cloak over the faithful above a cavalry battle, the victory of King Louis I of Hungary in 1377. An abbot of St Lambrecht kneels before her. Its unknown painter, active roughly from 1420 to 1440, is named after that panel, which now hangs in the Joanneum museum in Graz. He also designed a stained-glass window for the same abbey.

He probably worked in Vienna or Wiener Neustadt, and he is one of the last Austrian painters in the soft, flowing International Gothic, just as a harder realism was arriving. Scholars have often identified him with Hans von Tübingen, a painter of the same era, but that link has never been confirmed. The Belvedere holds three of his panels from about 1420 to 1430, a Crucifixion still in its original frame, Christ carrying the Cross, and the Holy Trinity shown as the Mercy Seat, with God the Father holding the crucified Son.