(active in Carinthia circa 1520)
The Nativity,
oil on panel, 148 x 56 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Galerie Hofstätter, Vienna;
Private collection, Upper Austria

Literature:
J. Höfler, Die Tafelmalerei der Dürerzeit in Kärnten (1500–1530), Klagenfurt 1998, pp. 58–59;
S. Rollig, B. Blauensteiner [eds.], Dürerzeit, Österreich am Tor zur Renaissance, exhibition catalogue, Cologne 2021, p. 272, mentioned under KAT. 5/1-2 (as ‘Verbleib unbekannt’)

This magnificent and remarkably well-preserved panel belongs to the few known works associated to the Master of the Oberfalkensteiner Altar Wings, an itinerant painter influenced by Albrecht Dürer working primarily in the Pustertal, South Tyrol and in Upper Carinthia around 1510.

The present painting depicts a tender and intimate scene of the Virgin adoring the Christ Child who lies on her voluminous blue mantle, propped up by supportive angels, whilst an elderly Joseph receives bales of hay to make up a bed. The painter has staged a night-time scene, though the stable is lit by the divine glow of the Child. This idea comes from the writings of the popular fourteenth-century mystic Saint Bridget of Sweden, who described the birth of Christ: ‘she gave birth to her son, from whom radiated such an ineffable light and splendour, that the sun was not comparable to it, nor did the candle that Saint Joseph had put there, give any light at all, the divine light totally annihilating the material light of the candle.’

Named after the pair of altar wings first originating from Oberfalkenstein and now conserved in the Landesmuseum Kärnten, Klagenfurt (inv. no. 001285), the moniker was introduced by Janez Höfler to help distinguish and identify a body of works that had previously been loosely attributed to the so-called Master of Niederolang or Nikolaus von Bruneck. In addition to the altar wings in Klagenfurt, Höfler identified a small corpus of works, including the paintings of the high altar in Möllbrücke, Carinthia, the fresco of the Crucifixion of Christ and the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Obervellach, Carinthia, and four panels of a small South Tyrolean Marian altar that have since been dispersed amongst various collections and are considered to be early works by this painter. Lastly Höfler included four other panels in this corpus of works, including the present panel (which Höfler only knew from a photograph), that may have been the wings of a further Marian altar in Pustertal, South Tyrol, which also were divided and dispersed (see Höfler, op. cit., 1998, pp. 54–65).

The other three panels of the Pustertal altar were identified by Höfler as being the Birth of the Virgin today in the parish office of Spittal an der Drau, Carinthia, the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple conserved in the Belvedere Museum, Vienna (inv. no. 4877) and the Death of the Virgin (private collection, South Tyrol). The supposition that the four panels are the component parts of the same altar piece is enhanced by the corresponding measurements of the panel in Spittal a. d. Drau (148.5 x 56 cm) and the present painting. The two remaining panels show signs of trimming, the Belvedere panel measures 141 x 57 cm. Höfler offers a hypothetical suggestion of an arrangement that was common at the time: with the Birth of the Virgin and Presentation of the Virgin as the respective inner and outer left-side panel, and the Death of the Virgin and Birth of Christ as the respective inner and outer right-side panel. However, the presence of a significant amount of goldground in the present panel, and the remarkable state of its conservation, suggest that the panel would have in fact been primarily inward facing.

The physiognomies of the figures reminiscent of Dürer and also the composition, betray an indebtedness to the Nuremberg master. Indeed, Christof Metzger (see C. Metzger, Das große Puzzeln: Albrecht Dürer und die österreichische Kunst um 1500, in: Rollig/Blauensteiner, op. cit., 2021, p. 58) proposes that it is possible that Albrecht Dürer arranged various commissions for the Master of the Oberfalkensteiner Altar Wings in the South Tyrolean and Carinthian regions. At the very least, the Master must have undoubtedly been in Nuremberg and made contact with Dürer’s workshop there, including the young assistants Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Schäufelein, as well as the book publisher and printer Ulrich Pinder who was responsible for the woodcuts in Der beschlossen gart des rosenkrantz Mariae (1505) and Speculum passionis (1507). The Master’s chief point of interest was in Albrecht Dürer himself, however, where the Geburt Christi, the central panel of the Paumgartner Altarpiece (circa 1500), could have served as a work of reference for the present painting.