Anticipations of horror
Published in The Guardian and The Hindu
What can the masterpieces of Christian art mean to the non-Christian? Can those of us without a Christian background or Christian convictions actually commune with the spirit of an artist whose faith and ideology we do not share?
As an art-loving Jewish atheist I’ve often asked myself these questions, and they’ve re-arisen with a new sharpness as a result of a recent visit to the town of Colmar in Alsace, near the French-German border.
There’s only one reason to visit Colmar, but it’s a compelling one. A small museum there is home to the Isenheim altarpiece, painted between 1510-1515 by an artist traditionally (but incorrectly) known as Grünewald. Scholars still disagree on the actual name and biographical details, but there’s no doubt that the altarpiece is the work of a highly accomplished, technically sophisticated artist, one who had absorbed the advances of the Italian Renaissance but deployed them selectively in the service of highly personal inner vision. It is probably the least well known and least visited of the great works of European art. “This is the altar of the spirit in the western world,” exclaimed Martin Buber, the Jewish existentialist mystic, “and Colmar is as great as Benares.”
The altarpiece is certainly a creation of startling beauty and depth. Grünewald sometimes paints with a throbbing, angular line, and sometimes with feathery delicacy. He can be charmingly naturalistic, harshly expressionist or dreamily tender. He stands alone as an orchestrator of contrasting, undulating colour. One of the glories of the altarpiece is a resurrection in which a magnificently serene, dematerialised Christ, a body reconstituted as overpowering light, is enveloped in a rainbow-splitting sunburst. Another is the nativity, in which a gilded choir of viol-playing angels serenade the peasant mother and her infant, who are seated in a magical mountainous landscape washed in pale blues and volcanic reds.
The altarpiece was originally painted for a hospital chapel in a monastery in Isenheim, 15 miles south of Colmar, and features episodes from the life of St Anthony, the fourth century Egyptian hermit who was the patron saint of the order that ran the monastery. He had also given his name to the disease commonly treated in the hospital, “St Anthony’s fire”. Later identified as ergotism, the sickness was spread through fungus-contaminated rye flour, and reached epidemic proportions in medieval Europe (and still occasionally surfaces in poorer countries, such as Ethiopia, where there was an outbreak in 2001). It’s a horrific affliction, whose symptoms include convulsions, cramps, spasms, skin eruptions, dry gangrene, headaches, nausea, mental disorientation and powerful hallucinations resembling those produced by LSD (which has chemical similarities with ergotamine, the active agent in the disease-causing fungus).
In the panel representing the Temptations of St Anthony, the bearded, bewildered saint is set upon by a richly imagined demonic horde. This menagerie, furred and feathered, jocose and sinister, seems more real and vivid than anything so far produced by CGI. Strangest of all in this exceedingly strange scene is the presence of a pathetic, broken, barely human figure clearly suffering from ergotism: skin discoloured, belly swollen, limbs twisted and emaciated. Is this supposed to be another demon? Or is it a fellow sufferer of demons? It feels like a sick person’s hallucination of himself.
The suffering of the flesh is a major theme of the most famous section of the altarpiece, the vast and bleak crucifixion. Here the immense, weighty figure of the dead, splayed Jesus towers over a small group of devastated mourners, each etched with a particular expression of grief, their meticulously drawn hands clasped in attitudes of desperation or desolation. They all stand out against the darkness of a world-encompassing night.
Christ’s heavy, drooping body is bleeding and broken. Grünewald shows us the nails driven through the palms and the convulsing upturned fingers. He shows the butchered feet and blue, encrusted lips. In detail, he shows the wounds left on the body by the flagellation that, by Roman custom, preceded the crucifixion. The whips used by the centurions were tipped with pieces of metal or bone and Grünewald shows the small thorny spurs left behind, embedded in the swollen flesh.
The marks of flagellation and crucifixion eerily resemble the marks of ergotism. In context, this was clearly an image of a body maimed by disease. What was its message to the sick, to those who came to the Isenheim hospital seeking a cure that did not exist? That their suffering was akin to Christ’s, and might like his be redeemed? Or simply that their suffering in the body was recognised and shared?
Those profoundly affected by Grünewald’s masterpiece include Pablo Picasso, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Elias Canetti, the Nobel Prize winning novelist, a Bulgarian Sephardi Jew who lived much of his life in London and wrote in German, described the crucifixion as: “a remembrance of the horrible things which men inflict upon each other. In this spring of 1927, war and asphyxiating gasses are still near enough to render this painting credible … all the horror that is at our doorway is anticipated here.”
Standing in front of the painting in 2008, it was Canetti’s perspective that made most sense to me. What I saw was the image of a human being tortured to death by the state, with the sanction of religious orthodoxy. I saw the unmitigated loneliness and pain of the bereaved. I saw the elemental human commonality of all victims of injustice.
Am I misinterpreting or misappropriating Grünewald? Yes and no. In 1517, two years after the completion of the altarpiece, Grünewald’s contemporary Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the doors of the church in Wittenburg. In declaring the priesthood of all believers, he set in motion the erosion of church authority and helped unleash the scientific spirit that would eliminate diseases like ergotism. In 1524, a violent, Protestant-inspired peasants’ rebellion swept through southern Germany. According to some sources, Grünewald’s support for the peasants’ cause led to his fall from official grace. He is said to have died soon after, in 1528, with a clutch of Lutheran tracts by his bedside. These are just the shadowy rumours that follow a shadowy figure. But they seem to me completely compatible with the personality that gave us the Isenheim altarpiece.
