German artist, one of the founders of the art of the Northern Renaissance Michael Pacher was born in 1435. He visited Italy more than once, experiencing the clear influence of the Quattrocentists, primarily A. Mantegna. He probably also traveled north, along the Rhine and the Netherlands. From 1467 he worked in Bruneck, where he had a large workshop, and after 1496 – in Salzburg.

The name of Michael Pacher is associated primarily with two large painted and sculpted altars (St. Wolfgang, 1471–81, pilgrimage church in St. Wolfgang, Upper Austria; and the Church Fathers, completed in 1483, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), where local Gothic traditions, coupled with early Renaissance Italian and Netherlandish influences, were fused into a masculine style that impresses with its energetic perspective angles, illusory volumetric plasticity of forms, and emotional expression of color.

He also worked as a wood carver; his painted sculpture (The Coronation of the Virgin in the central box of the St. Wolfgang altar) is stylistically more archaic than the painting. Michael Pacher also executed the altar of St. Lawrence (fragments of which are kept in the Museum of Medieval Austrian Art in Vienna). Michael Pacher was also active as a master of wall paintings, but these compositions (in the sacristy of the monastery church in Neustift, 1467–1468, and the monastery church in Innichen, 1477; both in Tyrol) have reached us in a rather poor state of preservation. He was died in 1498.