Art less noticed in Salzburg

Some art deserves to be less noticed, and I have to admit that sadly most of the contents of the Salzburg Cathedral Museum fall squarely into that category. Worse still, the reputedly magnificent apartments of the former prince-bishops were closed for restoration, so I found myself scooting past quantities of truly dire (but impressively large) canvases, an entire corridor of curiosity cabinets with several hundred years' worth of dead animals and other dusty relics in them, and various other forbidding remains, wondering whether the fabulously wealthy bishops of Salzburg were just less efficient than their contemporaries in looting the best religious art, or whether they preferred to keep their wealth at home and commission only from the locals at the expense of quality. But then in the very last display case (which displayed, unaccountably, a huge pair of Dutch clogs) I read a querulous note complaining of Nazi thefts and Allied bombings, which went some way to explaining it. But I spent time there, it being a cold January day, and a few things did catch my eye at random:-

Tucked away in a corner, a small dark canvas of the fascinating Temptations of St Anthony which I took to be a Hieronymus Bosch, but I've since realised was 'school of'. Sorry about the flash.

Here is a piece of stained glass, not particularly notable in itself, but I am interested in what the Virgin Mary is standing on. I was puzzled by something similar in the pilgrim church at Maria Woerth a couple of years back wrote a post on it somewhere) and this piece makes it clear. She is definitely standing on the moon, which has a squashed face peeping out. One sees moon and sun with faces in early representations of the crucifixion, a piece of anthropomorphism inherited from Roman art. I don't know about the man in the moon's intervening journey into the iconography of the Virgin Mary, and I plan to find out.

A very moving little crucifix, carved around 1300 in Salzburg. The bold and yet very delicately executed carving and the strength of the face which I have photographed so poorly, reminded me of some of the much larger Romanesque crucifixes I saw in Cologne and Barcelona.

The Austrians really excelled in wood carving, and to prove it here is a delightful Pentecost scene made around 1520 in my new home turf of Carinthia, the southernmost province. It's very little, but all the apostles' faces show such strength of character and individuality, with their big noses and bigger hairdos. It manages to be small without straying into 'cute' territory. This is a combination I really admire but feel I haven't yet managed to achieve.