About 1480 Peter Hemmel and his Strassburger Werkstattgemeinschaft—a loose association of glass-painting workshops that had been founded three years earlier and that all worked in the master's style—were commissioned by the dean and chapter of the Cathedral of Constance to glaze the chapter house. Of the original eighty-one panels, only nineteen, including the present two, have survived. The Cloisters' panels came from the upper-center apertures in the second window of the eastern elevation. On a stylistic basis they can be attributed to one of Hemmel's closest associates; known only as the Lautenbach Master, after the parish church that houses his most extensive glazing program, this exceptionally gifted painter can be identified by document as either Hemmel's son or his son-in-law.

The inimitable Hemmel style is typified in The Mater Dolorosa by the delicately modeled features of the figure's fleshy, rounded face and by the dramatic exuberance of the drapery, its broad planes juxtaposed with tubular folds and deep crevasses. The lush Astwerk, essentially a translation of canopies and tracery from an architectural to a vegetal vocabulary, set against a rich damascened background, is an innovative hallmark of the Hemmel manner. The head of Christ is a mid-nineteenth-century replacement.