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Isenheim Altarpiece: The Crucifixion | Matthias Grünewald | c. 1512–16

Isenheim Altarpiece: The Crucifixion | Matthias Grünewald | c. 1512–16

€50,95
€50,95
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About the artwork:

The central panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece presents one of the most harrowing depictions of the Crucifixion in Western art. Matthias Grünewald transforms the familiar image of Christ on the cross into a vision of raw human agony: his body is covered in open sores, his skin has turned a sickly green, and his fingers curl in unbearable tension. This grotesque realism reflects the suffering of patients in the Antonite hospital for whom the altarpiece was originally made, many of whom endured ergotism, a disease that caused convulsions and gangrene. To them, Christ’s decaying flesh was not blasphemy but empathy — a divine being who suffered as they did. Around him, the sorrow of Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist contrasts with the stillness of the dark background, emphasizing a world where faith and pain coexist in haunting silence.

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  • Title Isenheim Altarpiece — The Crucifixion, central panel of the closed (first) view (Retable d'Issenheim — La Crucifixion / Isenheimer Altar — Die Kreuzigung)
  • Artist Matthias Grünewald (Mathis Gothart Nithart; German Renaissance painter active in Aschaffenburg and Mainz, c.1470 - Halle, 31 August 1528)
  • Year of creation c. 1512-1516 (Grünewald painted the polychrome panels around an earlier carved wooden shrine and sculptures by Niclaus of Haguenau, c.1503. The altarpiece has two sets of folding wings, allowing three distinct configurations that were opened at different times in the liturgical calendar. For most of the year the wings remained closed, displaying Grünewald's harrowing Crucifixion in the central position, with St Sebastian — patron saint of plague victims — pierced by arrows on the left wing, St Anthony — patron of the Antonine hospital order — on the right wing, and the Lamentation predella below. The horribly wounded, emaciated, etiolated crucified figure of Christ, dead or close to death, his flesh pitted with plague-like sores — a pictorial gesture meant to show patients in the Isenheim hospital that Christ shared and understood their afflictions — is flanked by the desperately praying Mary Magdalene with her clasped raised hands at the foot of the cross, the traumatized Virgin Mary collapsing into the arms of St John the Apostle, and St John the Baptist on the right pointing to Christ with a Latin inscription "Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui" [He must increase, but I must decrease], with a small white Lamb of God at his feet holding a small cross and bleeding into a chalice. Although universally credited to "Matthias Grünewald," the painter's true identity is uncertain; the name was attached to him by the 17th-century biographer Joachim von Sandrart and may correspond to Mathis Gothart Nithart, c.1470-1528, who at times in early scholarship was even confused with Albrecht Dürer)
  • Technique/Medium Oil and tempera on limewood (linden) panel
  • Original dimensions Central Crucifixion panel: 269 x 307 cm (8 ft 9 ⅝ in x 10 ft); flanking wings: 232 x 75 cm each; predella (Lamentation): 76 x 340 cm; the full opened polyptych spans approximately 376 x 668 cm
  • Collection/Museum Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, Alsace, France (a former 13th-century Dominican convent; the altarpiece is the principal masterpiece of the museum and is permanently displayed in its chapel; originally created for the Monastery of St Anthony at Isenheim, near Colmar, which cared for victims of the plague and of St Anthony's Fire — ergot poisoning from contaminated grain)

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