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TWO painters, Michael Pacher and Hans Holbein the elder carried German paintcentury right into the established age of realism of the 16th century.
Michael Pacher in a remarkable altarpiece at Wolfgang, used all the Italian discoveries of perspective and used them with the convictions of one long accustomed to their effect. The self-conscious, rather tentativ, efforts of Lukas Moser are far removed from the sure, calculated attack on the viewer's sensibility put up by Pacher. Indeed .Pitcher's abrupt foreshortenings in his paintings have the same dramatic. vital, rather nervous impact that are given in his sculptures by the traditional g sharp-edged folds of drapery
and the exaggerated gesture.
In the painting illustrated St. Wolfgang, himself incommoded by his croeier, has engaged an indignant devil to hold his missal open while he reads it.
This remarkable devil, convincing enough to have a real existence. is like an animal that one might expect to meet in the Zoo. The thin, high legs and the sinewy body, surmounted by a diver's helmet of a head which is made ridiculous (in the White Knight manner) rather than ferocious by a set of antlers screwer into the ttm, is not an intimidating figure hot a slightly disgusting one. He has more of the feeling of vermin about him than of lion. and most of all he resembles a goat-a slightly laughable animal.
Iris Conlay