Workshop of the Master of Grossgmain

Around 1480 Erasmus Pretschlaipfer, provost of the Augustinian canons at Berchtesgaden, had his coat of arms painted on the outside of a small folding altarpiece. On the same wing stand Saint Erasmus, his own name saint, and Saint Barbara. The triptych came from the chapel of the Berchtesgadener Hof, the provostry's house in Salzburg, and its surviving panels reached the imperial collection in Vienna in 1806. The Belvedere now lists them under the workshop of the Master of Grossgmain. The two wings show Saints Christopher and James the Greater and Saints Gregory and Agatha inside, with an Annunciation on the outer left.

The master himself is known only from his pictures, documented in Salzburg between 1483 and 1499. He takes his name from scenes of the Life of the Virgin painted in 1499 for the parish church of Grossgmain, a village just outside Salzburg, and he worked close to Rueland Frueauf the Elder, the leading Salzburg painter of the day. Six complete panels and two fragments from that 1499 altar are still in the Grossgmain church.