Saint Wolfgang of Regensburg

Between circa 1503 and 1507, Hans Schäufelin worked as a journeyman painter in the workshop of Albrecht Dürer, alongside Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Suess von Kulmbach. He proved a more than capable assistant to his master and went on to pursue a successful career at Augsburg before settling in Nördlingen in 1519, undertaking extensive commissions from across the surrounding region.

Painted on both sides, the present panel would have certainly formed a part of a larger, winged altarpiece, most likely the right wing of a triptych, given that the saint is shown facing to the left and thus toward the central image. Dressed in the robes of his office as bishop of Regensburg, Saint Wolfgang is here depicted standing before a stone wall, draped with a blue cloth of gold. As well as the sudarium of his crozier, the saint also holds an axe in his hand, one of his most frequently represented attributes, which referenced a popular legend of his life. Following his decision to withdraw from the world and live as a hermit, the saint had gone to an area now known as the Wolfgangsee (‘Wolfgang's Lake’) in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria. Here, he threw an axe into the surrounding wilderness, determining that its landing place would be the location of his cell, as willed by God. The site of his eremitic retreat later served as the foundation of the town of St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut.

The reverse of the panel bears the remains of an angel, dressed in a white alb with elaborate feathered wings (fig. 1). According to Dr. Christof Metzger, this would have once borne a coat-of-arms (op. cit.), which has now been entirely effaced. The iconography of the rest of this retable must remain, unfortunately, obscure.

We are grateful to Dr. Christof Metzger for confirming the attribution to Hans Schäufelin and Workshop in 2021 on the basis of photographs.