Beheading of St. Catherine

This small panel is thought to be the earliest painting by Albrecht Altdorfer that survives, made somewhere around 1505 to 1510, when he was a young man just settling in Regensburg. It tells the end of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. According to the legend, the emperor had her bound to a spiked wheel, an angel smashed the wheel, and only then was she beheaded. Here she kneels in a red dress, the executioner in striped hose already swinging his sword, while the blast of light that destroyed the wheel breaks out of the sky in the upper corner. Even at the start, the young painter gave half the picture to shaggy trees and a steep bank of rock. The panel stayed for centuries at Wilten Abbey near Innsbruck, and the Vienna museum bought it in 1923 from a collector in London.