Crucifixion Altarpiece, Centre Panel: Christ on the Cross

Georg Peutinger, an Augsburg citizen with doctorates in both civil and church law, died in 1515. The museum thinks he most likely commissioned this altarpiece for the chapel of St Salvator in the cemetery of St Stephan in Augsburg, a building finished around 1517. Burgkmair dated the panels 1519, so the man who paid for them never saw them. His name survives on the outer shutters, where Saint George stands for Georg and Saint Sigismund for his brother and uncle, both called Sigmund.

Inside, one landscape runs across the centre and both wings, all of them hanging here, under a sky that is going dark, as Matthew's Gospel says it did. The two thieves hang on the wings, with Saint Martha below one cross and her brother Lazarus below the other. Then look at Christ's own cross. A small demon is squatting on it. In late medieval tellings of the Passion he is searching for any stain on Christ's soul.