Urban Görtschacher

Four panels painted in Carinthia around 1508 share an unusual signature. Somewhere in each picture grows a carefully observed chicory plant, the blue-flowered roadside weed that German speakers call Wegwarte. Two inscriptions bearing a name led the art historian Ernst Buchner to connect the group with Urban Görtschacher, a patrician and city judge of Villach, the market town on the Drava in southern Austria.

The Belvedere in Vienna holds three of those panels. The Ecce Homo and The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple are both dated 1508, and a many-scene Legend of Susanna belongs to the same group. The pictures sit between the late Gothic of the Alps and the new Italian manner, and their links to painting in Padua and Venice suggest the painter spent time south of the mountains. Frescoes of the Last Judgement at Millstatt, dated 1518, are also attributed to him.

The archives say little else about the man, and the name itself is now debated. A recent Vienna study reads the chicory panels as the product of a workshop with several members, and some scholars prefer the neutral label Master of the Chicory. The last known signature dates from 1530.