Albertus Pictor
Church painter of the Mälaren Valley.
Albertus Pictor probably came from Germany and ran a workshop in Stockholm. He and his assistants decorated some thirty churches with wall paintings full of biblical stories, saints and devils.
Albertus Pictor simply means “Albert the Painter”. He was probably born around 1440 in Germany and moved to Stockholm, where he is mentioned in the city records from the 1460s. He took over a painter’s workshop by marrying the widow of another painter, a common way of becoming a master at the time. He also worked as a pearl embroiderer, making pearl embroidery for costly church textiles.
He and his journeymen painted murals in some thirty churches in the Mälaren Valley, mainly in Uppland but also in Västmanland and Södermanland. Among the best known are Täby Church and Härkeberga Church, where the paintings are unusually well preserved. In several churches he signed his work, which was unusual for a church painter. He probably died around 1509.
The paintings cover vaults and walls with biblical stories, saints, moral warnings and fanciful tendrils. He often took his models from printed images, for example a kind of illustrated picture book about salvation known as the Biblia pauperum, “the Bible of the poor”. The figures have bold outlines and clear gestures, so that the message would reach the congregation. Unlike the Italian Renaissance, this art is not about perspective or anatomy but about telling a story clearly and vividly.
The most famous motif is in Täby Church: Death playing chess with a man. The image inspired Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. Albertus Pictor has therefore become one of the few named Swedish medieval artists whom many people know. His paintings are today an important source for how people in late medieval Sweden imagined heaven, hell and everyday life.