Versuchung Christi

Versuchung Christi presents Satan's three temptations in the desert as recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: to turn stones to bread, to cast himself from the temple, and to accept dominion over all kingdoms. This panel from around 1447, now in the Belvedere, combines multiple episodes within a single compressed composition, a convention common in narrative religious painting before the single-episode standard took hold. The desert setting gave the Master of Schloss Lichtenstein a rare landscape context, though the terrain remains more symbolic than observed. The painting belongs to the same Marian-Christological cycle as the artist's other surviving panels.

Tempera on panel. Multiple episodes are spatially condensed, with the tempter and Christ appearing in proximity across distinct micro-scenes. Rocky terrain is rendered as geometric forms rather than naturalistic geology, typical of workshop practice in the Upper German tradition.