Offering of the Old Testament

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century Munich was the most important bastion of the Counter Reformation beyond the Alps. It was in Munich that a representative Jesuit church, St. Michael’s, was built on German soil. Work on both the interior and the exterior, modelled on Il Gesù in Rome, was carried out by an international group of artists, who in addition to the Italians, were all Netherlandish and German masters trained in Italy.

Friedrich Sustris won the commission to design the altars of the church. The painting on the high altar was executed by Christoph Schwarz based on a drawing by Sustris. The two panels depicting the sacrificial offerings of the Old and New Testaments, one on each wing of the transept were executed by one of Sustris’s colleagues, Antonio Maria Viani.