Rueland Frueauf the Elder

In 1484 the city council of Salzburg called in Rueland Frueauf to judge the plans for a new high altar in the town's parish church. The commission itself went to Michael Pacher, the Tyrolean painter and woodcarver. Frueauf is documented in Salzburg from 1470, when the Benedictine abbey of St Peter paid him for work, and he later ran a workshop in Passau, the bishop's city on the Danube, where he held citizenship.

His main surviving work came a few years after that meeting. Around 1490 and 1491 he painted eight large panels for a Salzburg church, scenes from the life of the Virgin and the Passion of Christ, each about 2 metres tall and 1.35 metres wide, on spruce. All eight are now in the Belvedere in Vienna, among them the Flagellation, the Carrying of the Cross and the Crucifixion. After a long restoration the museum showed them together in 2017 and 2018, with the first monograph on the painter in more than 70 years.

The Belvedere also holds his portrait of a man whom archival research has identified as Jobst Seyfrid, a fellow painter in Passau. Frueauf died in Passau in 1507, and his son, Rueland Frueauf the Younger, became a painter as well.