Encounter with Grunewald

Why I took my family to Colmar in 1958 to see the Isenheim altarpiece I no longer remember. I may have heard of it in conversations with old school friends who had read Karl Barth's discussion of the piece in his Dogmatics and thus imagined that a visit to Colmar was needed to establish theological sophistication. A few years later, I hitchhiked alone to Colmar, deciding that the first trip had been too cursory, something like a tour group's tearing through the Louvre. Thirty years after the first visit, I took my family to Colmar once more but achieved no further sophistication. I am not proud of the fact that my taste in the visual arts is Philistine and must confess that my preoccupation with the Isenheim retable, and especially with what is exposed when its wings are closed, is more of a reflex from a reading of the Bible and its interpreters. The thing hangs above my bed--like the scriptures more of a challenge or even a judgment than of something known or understood.

Description

The Isenheim Altarpiece or retable is a polyptich composed of nine panels mounted on two sets of folding wings. The outer set consists of the Crucifixion with the Entombment below it and is flanked by St. Anthony and St. Sebastian. The inner set displays the Annunciation, the concert of Angels, the Nativity, and the Resurrection. The innermost panels, flanking a carved wooden shrine to St. Anthony, are St. Anthony and St. Paul in the Wilderness and the Temptation of St. Anthony. All three central panels are split in the middle to facilitate the changing of scenes. The entire piece is supported by a predella on the altar, which raises the retable from the altar table. When closed the altarpiece is nearly nine feet high by sixteen feet wide. The total painted surface of all the panels is over fifty feet in width, plus the predella which is two feet high by eleven feet wide. The order in which the artist painted the various panels has long been a matter of speculation.

My preoccupation is with the central panel, in the patois of the art historian, "Grunewald's Crucifixion." At its center is a gigantic Christ, nailed to a cross set on a river bank, the transverse branch of the cross bent into the shape of a bow. The body, swollen and blotched with wounds, is drained of blood, and scattered thorns stick in the flesh encrusted with blood and pus. At the ends of unnaturally long arms the hands are stiffened in a cramp, the shoulders are dislocated, while the knees are turned in, and the feet--one nailed on top of the other--are a heap of muscles beneath rotting flesh and blue toenails. The head sags on the bulging chest, the jaw is slack, and the mouth and eyes are half open. At the foot of the cross John the Evangelist supports the fainting Virgin Mary dressed in a Cistercian nun's habit of pure white, while Mary Magdalene, kneeling, voices lament. On the right stands the Baptist, just below life size, bearded, with a shock of hair cut straight across his forehead, his arms, legs, and feet bare. In one hand he holds an open book and with an prodigious index finger points to the victim with words in red Roman majuscules against the night sky that read illum oportet crescere me autem minui: "he must increase, but I must decrease." At the feet of the Crucified a lamb bears a cross, a stream of blood pouring into a chalice from its wounded breast. Beyond the gibbet flows a stream of water. (1) Thus, "from a heraldic point of view," as one analyst puts it, we have Christ in the center, the Baptist on the right, and the Madonna on the left, the figures positioned in such fashion that the group around the Virgin is viewed slightly from above, Christ from below, and the Baptist straight on. (2) Finally, to the left of the split in the crucifixion panel the head of the Crucified is turned toward the Virgin, but to the right of it the entire body except for the right arm is on John's side.

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The artist and the painting's locales

The polyptich is the work of Matthias Grunewald, a name discovered in the 1920s to have been fabricated by his first biographer, Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), but now hallowed with age. His actual name was Matthias, Mathias, or Mathis Gothardt, often trailed by his wife's surname, Niethart. What is purportedly known of Grunewald is a mixture of data and speculation. Presumably, he was born at Wurzburg, perhaps in 1460, 1470, 1475, or 1480. The first reliable clue to his whereabouts appears in documents naming him as owner of a workshop in Seligenstadt on Main from 1501 to 1521. By 1509 he had become court painter to the Archbishop of Mainz, and two years later he was retained by the cleric's successor, Albrecht of Brandenburg. Together with Albrecht's retinue he appeared at the 1520 coronation of Charles the Fifth (1500-1558) in Aachen. One historian writes that on this occasion Grunewald first met Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) who presented him with a few of his works in black and white, (3) while another refers to his collaborating with Durer on a Frankfurt altar twelve or thirteen years prior. (4) Still others interpret the collaboration as merely adding to what had been done earlier by Durer, whom, presumably, he had never met. (5) According to one biographer, he is reported to have grown full of disgust at the excesses of the higher officers of state but was nevertheless unable to put his art at the service of the Reformation, despite acquaintance with some of its classic representatives, among them Durer and Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560). (6) According to another, it was because of his sympathy with the Peasants' Revolt of 1525 that he voluntarily left Albrecht's service and settled in Frankfurt and Halle, cities sympathetic to the Protestant cause. (7) According to still another, because of his Protestant sympathies he was dismissed from his post, moved to Frankfurt, and, convinced that his life was in danger, fled to Halle. (8) Dying at Halle of the plague near the end of August, 1528, Grunewald left behind a rosary scented with musk, Luther's September or December Testament of 1522, and the Reformer's Wittenberg Invocavit Sermons delivered March 9-16, 1522. As early as in 1597, when Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) tried to buy the Isenheim Altarpiece, the name of its creator had already been forgotten. For years, Grunewald's work had been assigned to Durer. Not until the expressionist revolt against rationalism and naturalism did the greatest of Durer's contemporaries begin to arouse widespread interest.