Albertus Pictor

Albertus Pictor (about 1440-1509), a native of a small town called Immenhausen in Central Germany, is known from Swedish historical sources since 1465 when he was admitted as a citizen of Arboga, Sweden. Eight years later he moved to Stockholm where he, according to ancient custom, took over the workshop and married the widow of a deceased painter. Mentioned during the following decades in the town records both as a painter and as an embroiderer, Albertus Pictor was reponsible for the masterly decorating of the vaults and walls of over thirty churches in the Mälar region, for a third of which his personal signatures have been directly or indirectly transmitted to our time. In the last year of his life, he was also known to have played the organ during a mass for the dead in the Church of St. Nicholas in Stockholm. Obviously, he had in his younger days acquired not only an artistic training but also an educational grounding including the arts of literature, writing and arithmetic, and even some Latin, a prerequisite both for his liturgical organ playing and for his applying Latin explanatory texts to the biblical paintings. (Text: Thomas Hall, Pia Melin, Christina Sandquist Öberg, Jan Svanberg, Jan Öberg). Also see website about Albertus Pictor: www.albertuspictor.com/jubileumeng.htm