Michael Pacher

Austrian artist

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History

Michael Pacher (born c. 1435, County of Tirol—died August 1498, Salzburg?, Archbishopric of Salzburg) was a late Gothic painter and wood-carver, one of the earliest artists to introduce the principles of Renaissance painting into Germany.

Little is known of Pacher’s early life, but he is thought to have gone to Italy, where he was much impressed by the experiments in perspective of two eminent northern Italian artists of the Renaissance, Jacopo Bellini and Andrea Mantegna. That trip must have occurred sometime before Pacher began work on the St. Wolfgang altarpiece of the Pilgrimage Church of Sankt Wolfgang in Upper Austria (centre completed in 1479; wings completed in 1481). The large figures placed close to the picture plane and seen from a low viewpoint, the deep architectural perspective, and the dramatic foreshortening in such scenes as the “Expulsion of the Money Changers from the Temple” and the “Nativity” betray knowledge of Mantegna’s frescoes in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua. Pacher, however, rejected Mantegna’s statuesque compositions in favour of a dynamic sense of movement. In contrast to the painted wings, the carved and painted centre of the altarpiece, showing the “Coronation of the Virgin,” exhibits no Italian characteristics. Instead, its intricate carving that accentuates minute detail, the bright polychrome and sweeping draperies are wholly northern in spirit.

In the “Altarpiece of the Church Fathers” (c. 1483; Alte Pinakothek, Munich), Pacher uses direct and reflected light to create a convincing spatial ambience within a shallow depth. His narrow niches are dominated by the four monumental figures of the Fathers of the Church. The back of the altarpiece exhibits scenes from the life of St. Wolfgang and is notable for its attenuated male nude, whose idealized form and sharp outline again reflect Pacher’s knowledge of Mantegna’s art. Such late works as the “Betrothal of the Virgin” and the “Flagellation” (both c. 1484; Museum Mittelalterlicher Österreichischer Kunst, Vienna) repudiate his early dynamic compositions and introduce a new, static serenity. The faces and drapery are more idealized and more monumental than in his early works, and the figures are emphasized at the expense of the architectural background.