Michael Pacher

Pacher was a comprehensive artist with a broad range of sculpting, painting, and architecture skills producing works of complex wood and stone.

Pacher's masterpiece, the St. Wolfgang Altarpiece (1471–1481), is considered one of the most remarkable carved and painted altar shrines in all of European art.

[1] Pacher's other great work, the Altarpiece of the Church Fathers, created in 1483 for Neustift Monastery, combined painting and sculpture to produce a unique art form.

Pacher's influence was primarily North Italian, and his work shares characteristics with that of painters such as Andrea Mantegna.

Pacher's fusion of Italian Renaissance and Northern Gothic realism helped him to produce a uniquely personal style of painting.

Pacher visited Padua in northern Italy, where he became heavily influenced by the modern fresco work of Andrea Mantegna.

Mantegna was considered the renowned master of perspective, whose stunning, low-set standpoint spatial compositions were important to the development of Pacher's own style.

By 1467, Pacher was a distinguished artist and sculptor in Bruneck, twenty-five miles east of Brixen in the Puster Valley, where he had a workshop for making altarpieces; the house still exists.

Commissioned for Abbot Benedict Eck of Mondsee in 1471 and completed in 1481, the giant polyptych has two sets of wings that can be closed across the inner corpus with the sculptured Coronation presenting a majestic array of huge Gothic figures dominated by the beautifully kneeling Madonna.

His brother Friedrich Pacher may have painted the outer pieces of work depicting scenes from the life of Saint Wolfgang that are visible only when the altarpiece is closed shut.