Thomas von Villach

In 1480 three disasters struck the south-eastern Alps within a few months. Locusts ate the harvest, plague spread, and Ottoman raiders swept through Carinthia and Styria. Around 1485 a painter from Villach set all three on the outer wall of Graz Cathedral, where the fresco known as the Plague Picture can still be seen. He was Thomas Artula, called Thomas of Villach, and in 1486 a learned chancellor praised him as a second Apelles, after the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece.

Thomas was born in the late 1430s at Thörl, a village near Arnoldstein in the far south of Carinthia, and ran a workshop in Villach from about 1455. Much of his work is still on church walls. At Thörl he painted a vast allegory of the Living Cross, and at Gerlamoos the legend of Saint George covers the walls of the small church, which is why he is also known as the Master of Gerlamoos.

The Belvedere in Vienna holds three of his panels, painted around 1490 to 1495 and on long-term loan from a private collection since 2015 and 2016. One shows Saint George fighting the dragon, and the other two pair female martyrs, Ursula with Catherine and Dorothy with Christina. Late in his long life, from 1520, the painter also served as Villach's town judge.