Workshop of the Master of Schloss Lichtenstein

Around 1450 a Vienna workshop produced a monumental winged altarpiece with 14 scenes from the life of the Virgin and seven from the Passion. It was later taken apart, and its panels are now spread across museums in Vienna, Munich, Basel, Philadelphia, Moscow, Tallinn and other cities. For a long time scholars divided them among several painters before recognising them as parts of a single altar.

The painter has no known name. He is called the Master of Schloss Lichtenstein after two of his panels kept at Lichtenstein Castle, a hilltop castle in Württemberg in southern Germany, far from where they were made. His painting shows the influence of contemporary Netherlandish art, and recent research suggests the patron may have been Archduke Albrecht VI, brother of Emperor Frederick III.

The Belvedere credits The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple, from around 1445 to 1450, to the master's workshop. The panel passed through the Mainz collector Ludwig Marx and the Vienna banker Louis Rothschild before the Kunsthistorisches Museum bought it in 1928. In 2013 the Belvedere devoted an exhibition, Vienna 1450, to the master and his time.