Jakobus-Stephanus-Altar: Der hl. Jakobus tauft Josias und Hinrichtung des Jakobus

Marx Reichlich was a Salzburg painter trained under Michael Pacher who carried the Tyrolean master's spatial innovations into the early sixteenth century. The Jakobus-Stephanus Altar depicts two consecutive episodes from the life of James the Less — his baptism of the Jewish leader Josias (an apocryphal episode from the Acts of James) and his subsequent execution. Combining baptism and martyrdom on a single panel was standard for Bavarian altarpiece wings, where space constraints demanded narrative compression.

Reichlich inherits Pacher's taste for deep architectural interiors but softens the extreme foreshortening toward a more balanced Danube School style. The baptism scene's water, rendered with careful rippled reflections, and the crowd at the execution are handled with the narrative clarity Reichlich learned from Pacher's storytelling economy.