These well-preserved panels illustrating scenes from the Passion of Christ were painted in about 1450 by an anonymous artist working in the Allgäu region of southern Germany. The pair form part of a small corpus of works that share distinctive stylistic motifs and feature a recurring pattern of the letters VEA, leading Ludwig Meyer and others to identify the anonymous hand as the Master VEA. The panels are characteristic of religious typologies produced during the 15th century and likely served as part of a wing of a large altarpiece depicting other scenes from the Passion of Christ. Having only been known by scholars from historic images, these paintings appear on the market here for the first time in nearly 70 years.

The two works, which share the same horizontal wood grain, probably originally formed a double-sided panel in an altarpiece, with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane visible when the wings of the altarpiece were closed and The Flagellation when open. The first episode shows Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane; to the left his disciples Peter, John and James are asleep, while in the distance, Judas is depicted leading the guards to Christ. In the second episode of The Flagellation, Christ anchors the centre; he is tied to a post and flogged by guards dressed in colourful 15th-century attire. The scene is set in an enclosed terrace with patterned floor tiles and a gold background embossed with intricate patterns.

These paintings relate closely to a double-sided panel located in the Pokrajinski muzej, Ptuj, in eastern Slovenia, which portrays The Crowning with Thorns and The Carrying of the Cross (figs 1 and 2).¹ The shared measurements, distinctive gold punchwork, landscapes and patterned tiles attest to these panels being from the same workshop and ultimately from the same altarpiece as the present examples.² The contorted figures, caricatured faces and colourful costumes demonstrate the artist’s skill and delight in expressing different characters within his compositions. The iconography of the scenes suggests that the Ptuj panel would have likely been placed below or to the right of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and The Flagellation in the altarpiece, in accordance with the sequence of events of Christ’s Passion.

A further link between the present panels and the Ptuj panel are the carefully inscribed initials around the edges of the clothing of the figures in The Flagellation, The Crowning with Thorns and The Carrying of the Cross (fig, 3). The stylised lettering, including the letters A and V, have been borrowed from the Hebrew alphabet, perhaps copied from oriental fabrics, and appear in varying orders around the clothing, so no word or name can be discerned.³ Interestingly, a panel depicting The Resurrection of Lazurus, previously in the collection of Walter Steinmetz, Darmstadt (fig. 4), shows a similar embossed background and reveals the letters VEA under infrared reflectography on the right of the sarcophagus, executed in the same stylised font as seen here and in the Ptuj panel. These have subsequently been regarded as the initials of the artist’s workshop (fig. 5).⁴

In 1994 Ludwig Meyer identified the Assumption of Saint Mary Magdalene in the Mittelrhein-Museum, Koblenz, as belonging to a set of at least eight panels depicting the Life of Saint Mary Magdalene, of which six measure approximately 84 x 84 cm. and two approximately 82 x 39 cm.⁵ These eight panels, which include the Steinmetz Resurrection of Lazurus and The Resurrection (Fig. 6) were offered at auction in 1922, some as Swabian School, others as by the Master of Saint Severin and subsequently dispersed into European collections.⁶ Two of the panels from this sale were purchased by the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum and show The Communion of the Magdalen and a rare scene of God the Father appearing to a Marsilian Prince.⁷ The eight paintings have now been identified by Meyer, Karin Leitner and Bernd Konrad as originating in the same workshop as the panels offered here.

Art historians have located the Master VEA specifically to the Allgäu region due to the stylistic links to other paintings found in churches in the area. Meyer identifies a correlation between the Allgäu Master and the Master of the Riedener Altar, who completed a series of six Marian panels for St Mang Church, Rieden (Füssen), now in the Staatsgalerie in Hohes Schloss, Füssen.⁸

We are grateful to Dr Bernd Konrad, Dr Joshua Waterman and Ian Tyers for their assistance with the cataloguing of these works.

¹ Tempera on panel, c. 1450, 49.5 x 73.7 cm., inv. no. G 12 s.

² Leitner 1996, p. 843; the connection between these panels was first identified by Karin Leitner in 1992.

³ Notably the letter ‘A’ resembles Albrecht Dürer’s signature.

⁴ We are grateful to Dr Bernd Konrad for providing an image of the infrared reflectogram of this panel taken in 1994.

⁵ Panel painting, approx. 81 x 82 cm., Mittelrhein-Museum, Koblenz; see A. Stange, Kritisches Verzeichnis, vol. 2, Munich 1970, p. 103, no. 455 (Stange identified this workshop as being from the Middle Rhine region, c. 1450. This identification has now been disregarded).

⁶ Anonymous sale, Vienna, Samuel Kende, 21 January 1922, lots 34–35 (as Swabian Master, c. 1450); lots 37–42 (as Master of Saint Severin, c. 1500).

⁷ Konrad 2009, no. NW455-1, d and e.

⁸ Leitner 1995, p. 333. The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen catalogues these as by an Ulm Master, c. 1460/65, from the altar of the St. Mang Church, Füssen, inv. nos WAF 1094–99.