The Isenheim Alterpiece by Matthias Grünewald

Not much is known about this mysterious contemporary of Dürer, but the folding panels of his astounding, multi-layered early 16th-century work in Colmar, France amaze admirers to this day. Grünewald’s depiction of the extremes of physical anguish and mystic joy, combined with images at once ecstatic, scarifying and quite eerie, makes this one of the supreme works of northern European imagination.

Probably begun in 1512 and finished in 1515 in the small Alsatian hamlet of Isenheim near Colmar, the Isenheim Altarpiece is shocking in its intensity and many are even somewhat repelled by the graphic nature of the central crucifixion scene. Grünewald has shown the Cross as two roughhewn, green logs with the crossbar drawn down by its gory, dreadful weight. Christ has just expired in agony, rigor mortis has set in, and his fingers are frozen into a horrible, clutching position. The weight of his tormented body has drawn his arms almost from their sockets. Below the Cross on the right stands John the Baptist with a blood-red cloak thrown over his camel skin.

Once the altarpiece doors are opened, the tones of greenish black and blood red are transformed to flame red, gold, and blue. The left panel is the Annunciation with the angel appearing to Mary in a chapel whose Gothic vaults and tracery are drawn and painted with amazing precision. The central panel shows Mary caring for the Christ Child in the manner of a nurse while standing before a richly carved and painted portico. Then the cycle culminates in the right panel with what is probably the most astonishing Resurrection scene in Christian art.

The work of Grünewald expresses the torment of the early sixteenth century more fully than that of any other artist of the period. These tortured Gothic forms, painted before Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, express an unmistakable message of emotional intensity and terrible realism that were never reached by another artist again.

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