Kirchenväteraltar, Flügelaußenseite: Der hl. Augustinus heilt den Stiftsprobst

Michael Pacher's Kirchenväteraltar (Church Fathers Altarpiece) was painted for the Augustinian collegiate church of Neustift (Novacella) in South Tyrol, and the exterior wings showing Augustine healing a sick provost function as the closed-altarpiece face visible on non-feast days. Pacher, who trained as both painter and sculptor in the Tyrolian tradition, had absorbed the spatial innovations of Mantegna during a probable journey to Padua in the 1460s, and his paintings show radical perspectival foreshortening unprecedented in German art of his time. The healing scene uses a deep architectural interior with plunging orthogonals — a deliberate Mantegnesque device.

Pacher drives the perspective recession sharply upward through a vaulted Gothic interior rendered with extreme precision, the ceiling coffers and floor tiles creating a spatial tunnel behind the figures. His characteristic gold and deep scarlet vestments anchor the theological dignity of Augustine against the illusionistic architecture.