The Hinderkircher Madonna

The kneeling man near the bottom corner is Johannes Hinderkircher, a canon, later provost, of Gurk Cathedral in Carinthia, and he paid for this panel before 1445. A prayer scroll curls up from him toward the Child, whose hand touches its upper end, and a small coat of arms sits by his knee. The panel is unsigned and given to Konrad von Friesach because it closely matches the Lenten veil he signed for Gurk in 1458, another of Hinderkircher's commissions. Much later it belonged to Albert Figdor, a Viennese banker and collector. After his death in 1927, Austrian monument law stopped his heirs from taking the collection abroad, and in the settlement part of it passed to the state. This panel reached the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1930 and the Belvedere in 1953.