The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple

Luke's Gospel tells how Mary and Joseph lost the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem and found him three days later in the Temple, among the teachers. On this small panel, still in its original softwood frame, he stands at a lectern with a finger on an open book, while the learned men around him wear the rich robes and tall hats of a prosperous town around 1508. Outside the vaulted hall his parents are only just arriving, his mother pressing a cloth to her eyes. On the step in the foreground lies a sprig of chicory with a blue flower. The same plant marks each panel of a small group, and two name inscriptions led the art historian Ernst Buchner to link them with Urban Görtschacher of Villach, the name the Belvedere uses. A recent University of Vienna study suggests instead a workshop of several painters.