Resurrection of Christ

In June 1918, in the last year of the war and months before the Habsburg monarchy fell, the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna put its recent acquisitions on show, and this panel was among them. It had been bought in 1915 from a Vienna antiques dealer. The Belvedere now gives it to an unknown Tyrolean painter of around 1500. At some point the paint was moved onto a new wooden support, and the pale flecks across the surface are losses. Christ steps past the stone tomb in a red cloak, the wound in his side still bleeding, holding a staff with a cross and a banner. A red-winged angel in white sits on the tomb's edge. One guard slumps asleep in green armour under a plumed helmet, the other, in yellow, sits by his halberd, and behind them a walled town lies under high mountains.