The Three Phases of Life and Death

This panel is under half a metre tall, painted around 1509 or 1510 for someone who meant to look at it from close up. A young woman stands naked in a wood, absorbed in her reflection in a round mirror. Behind her Death, a shrunken corpse with its skin coming away, holds an hourglass over her head, and an old woman raises an arm to hold him back. At the young woman's feet a small child sits wrapped in the veil that Death has in his other hand, with no idea of what is happening above him.

The picture spent a century and a half in Salzburg, from the time of Archbishop Guidobald Thun, who ruled the city from 1654 to 1668. In 1803, in the redrawing of the German lands forced by the Napoleonic wars, the archbishops lost their state, and their paintings went first to the Residence and then to the imperial gallery in Vienna, which took this one in 1806.