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| Author's biography |
| Matthias Gr黱ewald (original name Mathis Gothardt Neithardt), one of the greatest German painters of his age, whose works on religious themes achieve a visionary expressiveness through intense colour and agitated line. The wings of the altarpiece of the Antonite monastery at Isenheim, in southern Alsace (dated 1515), are considered to be his masterpiece.Although it is commonly agreed that Master Mathis was born in the German city of W黵zburg, the date of his birth remains problematic. The first securely dated work by Gr黱ewald (a name fabricated by Sandrart who published the first biography of the artist in 1675 but it is now hallowed by usage), the Mocking of Christ of 1503 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), seems to be that of a young man just become a master. Gr黱ewald appears first in documents of about 1500 either in the town of Seligenstadt am Main or Aschaffenburg. By about 1509 Gr黱ewald had become court painter and later the leading art official (his title was supervisor or clerk of the works) to the elector of Mainz, the archbishop Uriel von Gemmingen.About 1510 Gr黱ewald received a commission from the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heller to add two fixed wings to the altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin recently completed by the painter Albrecht D黵er. These wings depicting four saints are painted in grisaille (shades of gray) and already show the artist at the height of his powers. Like Gr黱ewald's drawings, which are done primarily in black chalk with some yellow or white highlighting, the Heller wings convey colouristic effects without the use of colour. Expressive hands and active draperies help blur the boundaries between cold stone and living form.About 1515 Gr黱ewald was entrusted with the largest and most important commission of his career. Guido Guersi, an Italian preceptor, or knight, who led the religious community of the Antonite monastery at Isenheim (in southern Alsace), asked the artist to paint a series of wings for the shrine of the high altar that had been carved in about 1505 by Nikolas von Haguenau of Strasbourg. The subject matter of the wings of the Isenheim Altarpiece provided Gr黱ewald's genius with its fullest expression and was based largely on the text of the popular, mystical Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden (written about 1370).The Isenheim Altarpiece, which is now in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France, consists of a carved wooden shrine with one pair of fixed and two pairs of movable wings flanking it. Gr黱ewald's paintings on these large wing panels consist of the following. The first set of panels depicts the Crucifixion, the Lamentation, and portraits of St Anthony and St Sebastian. The second set focuses on the Virgin Mary, with scenes of the Annunciation and a Concert of Angels and Nativity, and the Resurrection. The third set of wings focuses on St Anthony, with St Anthony and St Paul in the Desert and the Temptation of St Anthony.The altarpiece's figures are given uniquely determined gestures, their limbs are distended for expressive effect, and their draperies (a trademark of Gr黱ewald's that expand and contract in accordion pleats) mirror the passions of the soul. The colours used are simultaneously biting and brooding. The Isenheim Altarpiece expresses deep spiritual mysteries. The Concert of Angels, for instance, depicts an exotic angel choir housed within an elaborate baldachin. At one opening of the baldachin a small, glowing female form, the eternal and immaculate Virgin, kneels in adoration of her own earthly manifestation at the right. And at the far left of the same scene under the baldachin, a feathered creature, probably the evil archangel Lucifer, adds his demonic notes to the serenade. Other details in the altarpiece, including the horribly wounded body of Christ in the Crucifixion, may refer to the role of the monastery as a hospital for victims of the plague and St Anthony's fire. The colour red takes on unusual power and poignancy in the altarpiece, first in th |
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