Joseph Is Thrown into the Well

In 1951 this damaged panel turned up in the Franciscan friary in Salzburg. It came from the high altar that Michael Pacher built for the church next door in his last years, dismantled in the early 1700s, and the find proved decisive for working out how that altar had looked. The subject comes from Genesis. Joseph's brothers, jealous of their father's favourite, throw him into a dry well and later sell him to passing merchants. Much of the paint is gone. Only a young man in a yellow tunic at the right and a bearded man behind him are still whole. The figures lifting Joseph over the stone rim of the well have almost vanished, and where the paint has flaked away, the lines of the drawing underneath show through, among them a man crouching near the bottom.