Expulsion of the money-changers

The Expulsion of the Money-Changers by the Meister des Albrechtsaltares zu Klosterneuburg, painted around 1495 and now in the Liege Fine Arts Museum, depicts Christ's dramatic clearing of the Temple in Jerusalem, in which he overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove out those selling animals for sacrifice — the episode that is reported in all four Gospels and that theologians read as both a historical act and a typological cleansing of the Church. The anonymous master, named for the Albrecht Altarpiece in the Augustinian monastery of Klosterneuburg near Vienna, was active in the Austrian painting tradition of the late fifteenth century, producing ambitious narrative altarpieces for major ecclesiastical commissions. The subject's combination of architectural setting, crowd action, and moral violence made it a demanding test of a painter's compositional range. The Liege panel preserves a major example of this Austrian master's narrative skill outside his home region.

The master renders the scene with the controlled energy characteristic of late fifteenth-century German narrative painting, Christ's figure at the dramatic center of a scene of overturned tables and fleeing figures. The architectural space of the Temple forecourt is organized to channel the viewer's attention toward the central action, and the crowd's varied reactions animate the moral drama.