Rueland Frueauf the Younger

A medieval legend tells that the veil of Agnes, wife of Margrave Leopold III of Austria, was blown away by the wind, and that years later Leopold found it caught in a bush while out hunting and founded the monastery of Klosterneuburg on the spot. In 1505 Rueland Frueauf the Younger told that story on four panels of the monastery's Leopold altarpiece, showing the ride out, a wild boar hunt, the finding of the veil and the vow.

He was the son of Rueland Frueauf the Elder, a painter who worked in Salzburg and Passau, and he became a citizen of Passau in 1497 after marrying a widow, Dorothea Stahl. For the hunting scenes he looked to the calendar pages of the Limbourg brothers, the celebrated manuscript illuminators, and he set his figures in the landscape around Klosterneuburg and the Danube. That attention to real landscape is why he counts among the forerunners of the Danube School, the painters around Albrecht Altdorfer who made woods and rivers a subject of their own.

Almost all of his surviving work is still at Klosterneuburg. The Belvedere holds his votive panel of 1508, with Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, and Saints Leopold, Ulrich and Andrew.