Workshop of the Master of Pulkau

The Vision of Saint Bernard in the Belvedere came from Lilienfeld, a Cistercian abbey in Lower Austria, where it stayed until 1935. The subject suited the house. Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th-century abbot, was the great saint of the Cistercian order, and this panel of around 1510 shows one of the visions tradition gave him. The Belvedere credits it to the workshop of the Master of Pulkau.

That master is a working name for an unknown hand of the Danube School, the painters of the Danube region around 1500 known for their expressive landscapes. He is named after the winged altar of about 1515 in the Holy Blood church at Pulkau, north of Vienna, which stands roughly 10 metres tall when open. Scholars still debate whether its panel painter is the same person as the Historia Master, the anonymous illustrator of a chronicle of the emperors Frederick III and Maximilian. The Vision of Saint Bernard reached the Belvedere in 1977 as a gift from a London collector.