The Virgin and Child

Most of what we know about this panel is written across it. A long Latin inscription names the man who paid for it, Koloman Räpff, a cleric in the service of Duke Ernest of Bavaria, who then governed the diocese of Passau. Räpff had it made in memory of a priest, Ludwig Fröschl, founder of a brotherhood devoted to the angel's greeting to Mary, and he dedicated it to himself as well. The inscription opens with the year 1522 and closes with 1531, the year the museum gives for the painting. Altdorfer died seven years later, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum sees the beginnings of his late style in the colour and in the way the figures are modelled. His monogram sits in the upper right corner. Centuries later the panel turned up in a private collection in Pisa, passed through an auction in Pressburg, today's Bratislava, in 1875, and came to the Vienna museum in 1922.