Altarpiece of the Church Fathers

In 1805, after Napoleon beat Austria, the Peace of Pressburg gave Tyrol to Bavaria. Two years later Bavaria suppressed the Tyrolean monasteries, including the Augustinian canons of Neustift near Brixen, whose provost Leonhard Pacher had probably ordered this altarpiece. In 1812 it reached Munich as secularised church property.

The four great teachers of the Latin Church, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory and Ambrose, sit under pink Gothic canopies hung with gilded foliage, with small grey statues in the side niches. It looks like a carved shrine, even a stone one, yet every part of it is paint on panels of Swiss stone pine. The tiled floors tilt steeply toward you. Jerome's lion, seen from behind, lifts a bleeding paw. Beside Pope Gregory a nearly naked man in a crown climbs out of flames. He is the pagan emperor Trajan, pulled from purgatory, as the legend goes, by Gregory's prayer.

Tyrol returned to Austria in 1814, and the canons came back to Neustift in 1816. The altarpiece stayed in Munich, where its four panels are catalogued separately.