The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Matthias Grünewald · a winged altarpiece in three openings · wings in oil on limewood, painted c. 1512–1516, over an earlier carved and gilded shrine and predella by Niclaus of Haguenau · four movable doors painted on both sides, two fixed wings and a predella cover, eleven painted faces · made for the Antonite preceptory at Isenheim, Upper Alsace · Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, shown dismantled · as cleaned in a campaign completed in 2022
Mode
Winged altarpiece as hospital devotion; Passion, Incarnation and the life of a desert saint in one hinged object
Mythos
The god who takes the wound; the wounded healer; the hermit in the desert and the assault of the demons; the light out of the tomb
Phase
Three openings on the calendar of a house, death turned to light by the parting of the doors; painted c. 1512–1516 round an earlier carved shrine
Presentation
Oil on limewood, with polychromed and gilded limewood carving; eleven painted faces and two carved groups in three views, no subject shown twice; now standing apart in sequence
Register
From the clawed hands in the night to the coloured sun of the Resurrection; terror and radiance in every opening, calm in the desert and the shrine
Scale
The Passion and the Incarnation, one hospital order, the bodies of its sick
Governing Proposition
An altarpiece made for a hospital of the gangrene called Saint Anthony’s fire shows, closed, a God whose body is the body of the sick: pitted, greenish, the feet crushed on one nail. Opened, the same boards become the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Resurrection, and at the second parting the house’s own saint, beaten by monsters beside a man with the disease. The wager of the altarpiece is that the dying body and the risen body are one body seen from its two faces, and that suffering is not cancelled by glory but carried into it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Antonites kept hospitals for the sick of Saint Anthony’s fire, the gangrenous and convulsive poisoning now known to come from ergot on rye. At their preceptory at Isenheim, in Upper Alsace about twenty kilometres south of Colmar, the high altar already had a carved shrine by Niclaus of Haguenau: Saint Anthony enthroned between Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, polychromed and gilded, over a carved predella of Christ and the apostles. Round it, about 1512 to 1516, Mathis Gothart Nithart, the painter known as Matthias Grünewald, built a set of painted wings in oil on limewood. The painting came second. It was made to close over a carving that was already there and to open onto it, and the altarpiece is the two together.
The wings are a machine of doors. An outer pair, painted on both sides, meets at the centre; behind it an inner pair, painted on both sides, closes over the shrine; two fixed wings stand at the edges, and a painted cover lies over the predella. That makes eleven painted faces, ten painted subjects and two carved groups, in three views, and no subject appears in more than one view. Closed, the altarpiece shows the Crucifixion across the outer doors, Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony on the fixed wings, and the Lamentation below. Part the outer doors and their backs show the Annunciation and the Resurrection, either side of the Concert of Angels and the Nativity on the inner doors. Part those, and their backs show Anthony’s visit to Paul the Hermit and his temptation, either side of the shrine.
By the usual account the altarpiece stood closed on ordinary days and in Lent, was opened at the first parting for Sundays and the feasts of Christ and the Virgin, and at the second for the feast of Saint Anthony and the house’s own feasts. Its views were a calendar, and its doors turned one subject into another. The hinge did the work of a sentence: to open the Crucifixion was to find, on the backs of the same boards, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. On most days, then, what stood over the altar of a hospital for the gangrenous was the closed state, and the closed state is a dead body.
Movement II
The Crucifixion is set in a night. The crossbeam is bowed by the weight it carries, and the body hanging from it is painted larger than the living who stand around it. The skin is pitted with thorn-wounds over its whole surface and turns greenish toward the hands and feet; the feet are crushed together on one nail; the fingers are wrenched upward and spread, clawing at the dark. Over the head is the titulus with its four letters, INRI. For the patients of the house the body on the cross was a body like their own. The God of the altar had their skin.
On the left are the mourners. The Virgin, in white against the night, falls back into the arms of John; the Magdalene kneels below with her hair down, her jar on the ground, her fingers twisted and locked together. On the right stands John the Baptist, who was dead before the Crucifixion and is there to point. He is heavy, with a book in one hand, and the index finger of the other is drawn out long toward the body. Beside his arm are the words of John 3:30, “illum oportet crescere me autem minui” (“He must increase, but I must decrease”). At his feet the Lamb holds the cross, and its blood runs into a chalice. The witness in the picture is the one who makes himself less.
The fixed wings flank the body with the two saints a hospital would call on: Sebastian, against the plague, and Anthony, the house’s patron, against the fire, with a demon at the window behind him. Below, on the predella, the Lamentation lays the dead body out at the height of the altar table, where the body would lie. The closed view is one argument in four fields: the death, the two who intercede against the house’s diseases, and the burial.
Movement III
At the first opening the Crucifixion parts down the middle and swings away. On the left wing, its back, an angel rushes into a chapel and Mary turns away from him, and Isaiah’s prophecy is part of the scene. In the middle, across the two inner doors, is a single scene. On the left, under an ornate painted tabernacle, angels make music, one bowing a viol, one feathered, and inside the tabernacle a crowned figure is wrapped in light. On the right the Virgin holds the Child in a landscape, and light breaks from the upper sky onto them both.
Who the crowned figure is has not been settled: the Virgin, the Church, the Virgin’s soul, the Temple. The Nativity beside it is plain by contrast and full of things: a tub and a jug at the Virgin’s feet, a cradle, and round the Child a torn cloth. On the right wing, the back of the other Crucifixion door, the Resurrection lifts the body out of the tomb into a disc of red and yellow light. The shroud changes colour as it rises, from blue through red to yellow, and the soldiers are thrown to the ground. The wounds have not gone. They shine.
The Resurrection is painted on the back of the Crucifixion. The same boards carry the dead body on one face and the risen body on the other, and the act that shows the second is the act that hides the first. Only a hinged object can say this: that the dying body is the closed state of a body whose open state is light, and that the wounds of the one are carried, shining, into the other. For a house of the sick the feast did not take the wound away. It showed it lit.
Movement IV
At the second opening the inner doors part as well, and the Concert and the Nativity swing away with them. Their backs belong to the house’s saint. On the left Anthony visits Paul the Hermit: two old men in the desert, a palm, a deer, a raven bringing them bread, plants at their feet. The panel is calm by design, the quietest field in the altarpiece. On the right is its opposite. Anthony is dragged by the hair through a storm of beasts, each an anatomy of its own, and they beat him.
In the corner of the Temptation lies a sick man, his belly swollen and his skin broken with sores, a body with the house’s disease. Beside him a small paper asks Jesus, in Latin, where he was when the wounds needed him. The patient’s question is set inside the altarpiece, in the patron’s own panel, beside the patron under assault. And the Temptation is painted on the back of the Nativity: the infant’s household and the saint’s torment are one board, the grace and the assault that act on flesh.
Between the two painted wings the shrine stands open, and the carved Anthony appears only now, after both pairs of doors have parted: enthroned, grave and exact, between Augustine and Jerome, over the carved Christ and apostles of the predella. The carving belongs to the Upper Rhine retable of a generation before. Its gilded calm keeps its own law beside the night of the Crucifixion and the coloured light of the Resurrection, and the painting, built round it, does not make the two one. At the last parting the altarpiece ends on the work it was given, not on the work it made.
Movement V
The painter died at Halle in 1528. He had no school, and Dürer’s measured, Italianate body won the century; his name was lost for centuries, and the altarpiece stood in a provincial hospital church, little regarded, for nearly three hundred years. The Revolution carried it to Colmar. The order that made it, the hospital and the disease have all gone since. It stands now in the chapel of a former Dominican convent, in the Musée Unterlinden.
Its reach came late. Huysmans wrote the painter back into view in Là-bas in 1891, from the Crucifixion at Karlsruhe. In 1917 the altarpiece was taken to Munich and shown there, and in 1919 it came back to Colmar; the German Expressionists took it up. Otto Dix set his triptych Der Krieg (1929–1932) over a predella. Picasso made Crucifixion drawings after it in 1932. Hindemith wrote Mathis der Maler, a symphony in 1934 and an opera first staged at Zurich in 1938. Max Ernst painted the Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1945, and Graham Sutherland a Crucifixion for Northampton in 1946. Karl Barth kept a reproduction of the Crucifixion over his desk.
The altarpiece was evacuated in the Second World War and came back. Its painted panels were cleaned in a campaign completed in 2022, whose extent was disputed while it was under way. The casing, hinges and frame are gone. In Colmar the panels stand apart, in sequence down the chapel on separate supports, with the shrine at the far end, so that every face can be seen at once and none can be opened or closed. The Crucifixion and the Resurrection, which the doors kept from each other, are in view together. Nothing hides anything now, and nothing can close.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. Closed, no field could go: the Crucifixion is the subject, Sebastian and Anthony are a hospital’s two intercessors against plague and fire, and the Lamentation completes the Passion at the height of the altar table. At the first opening the Annunciation, Nativity and Resurrection are the Incarnation’s three hinges, and the Concert is the threshold between two of them. The second opening is the house’s saint, his hermit and his torment. What holds the axis lowest, beside one other, is the shrine: carved before the painting was conceived, it is a given the painting was built round, not a necessity of its argument. Within the painting, the Concert’s tabernacle runs past what it needs, and the Annunciation is the field the sequence could most nearly lose.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, and it holds. God’s body is the body of the sick: the Christ on the cross is pitted with thorn-wounds over the whole skin, greenish at the extremities, the feet crushed on one nail, and for the patients of a gangrene hospital the incarnation meant that God had their body. Second, the same body is the risen one: the Resurrection lifts a body whose wounds shine, not one whose wounds are gone. Suffering is carried into glory, not cancelled by it. Third, the Baptist’s words beside his arm, “illum oportet crescere me autem minui” (“He must increase, but I must decrease”, John 3:30): witness points away from itself. The doctrine and the therapy are inherited; these choices are not.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Height and frequency are both high, in terror and in radiance, and in every opening: the Crucifixion’s night, the bowed crossbeam, the hands clawed against the dark; the Virgin in white falling back into John’s arms; the body rising into a disc of red and yellow light while the soldiers are thrown down; light breaking from the upper sky onto the Virgin and Child; Anthony dragged by the hair through a storm of beasts. The terror is held by the night, the scale and the Baptist’s calm, so the dread is grand rather than lurid. Held below the top by the stretches between: the Annunciation, the Visit to Paul, calm by design, and the shrine, whose gilded dignity elevates nothing. Of ten painted subjects, about half reach the summit.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, and the hinge is the builder: to open the altarpiece is to part the Crucifixion and find behind it the Incarnation and the Resurrection, so the passage from death to life is performed by the object. The archetypes bear load: the god who takes the wound, the wounded healer, the hermit in the desert, the assault of the demons, the light out of the tomb. The second opening sets the house’s patron as the type of the patient, beaten by monsters beside a man with the disease. Every figure stays particular: the Magdalene with her hair down and her jar on the ground, the Baptist heavy, with a long finger. Held below the top because the narrative is inherited whole; what is built is the arrangement.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Upper Rhine retable of carved shrine and painted wings, Pacher and Schongauer among its masters; the German crucifix of the suffering body; Netherlandish oil. In the same years the field was turning to Dürer’s measured, Italianate body. The departure: hierarchical scale kept and made a weapon in an age of perspective; a body painted in decomposition, at life size and over; colour used as light and as theological state, so the risen body dissolves into a coloured sun; a Concert whose space is a vision, not a room. It ran against the current and left no school. But nothing shows the commission risked anything: the house wanted it, and no censure is on record. A swerve this large at no recorded cost is held below its turn.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The work knows what it knows by being a machine that changes. Substitute a single panel and it loses its central statement: that the dying body is the closed state of a body whose open state is light. The Crucifixion is backed by the Annunciation and the Resurrection, so the same boards carry the dead and the risen body; the Nativity is backed by the Temptation, the infant’s household and the saint’s assault one board. The Lamentation lies at the altar table’s height, where the body would lie. The second parting turns the whole toward the house’s carved saint, seen only when both pairs of doors are open. Held below the top because the shrine is a given the form was built round, and the tabernacle is more ornament than instrument.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence over promise, on a shorter record than the oldest works. Little regarded for nearly three centuries, the altarpiece has been re-examined densely for about 130 years, since Huysmans wrote the painter back into view in 1891, and the questions that stay open are of meaning. Who is the crowned figure in the Concert’s tabernacle: the Virgin, the Church, the Virgin’s soul, the Temple? What is the feathered angel? What texts lie behind the Crucifixion and the Nativity? How far is the whole to be read as medicine, and what disease do the bodies show? Do its sympathies lean Lutheran or Catholic, and what does the Baptist’s finger demand? Held a step below the form for the shorter span of the evidence.
Score: 9.1 / 10
On view since 1516, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: the work showed that the body’s deformation, and colour freed from description, could carry the sacred to its height. The reach is late. In its own century it redirected almost nothing: it stood in a provincial hospital church, the painter had no school, and Dürer’s line won. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and that holds the axis lowest, beside one other. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the German Expressionists after the Munich showing of 1917–1919; Dix’s triptych Der Krieg (1929–1932), with its predella; Picasso’s Crucifixion drawings (1932); Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler; Ernst’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1945); Sutherland’s Northampton Crucifixion (1946); and Karl Barth, who kept a reproduction of the Crucifixion over his desk.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 510 years: through the end of its order, the Revolution, removal to Munich in 1917, evacuation in the Second World War, and three centuries of neglect. The image survives nearly entire, and it has outlived what made it: the order, the hospital and the disease, whose cause is known and whose epidemics are past. People come for the body on the cross, not the therapy. What holds it is what has been lost of the form. The casing, hinges and frame are gone; in Colmar the three openings stand side by side, so the act of opening is no longer performed; and the surface read is the one left by a cleaning whose extent was disputed while under way. The image survives whole; the machine survives as parts.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil on panel, with the carving weighed in. The making is load-bearing: colour as light, in the Resurrection’s shroud passing from blue through red to yellow, the aureole and the luminous Concert, handled as nothing else in German painting of the period; the Crucifixion’s skin, painted as surface and as decay, and the Virgin’s white against the night; the hands, Christ’s spread against the dark, the Magdalene’s knotted, the Baptist’s finger drawn out to carry his sentence; the Temptation’s monsters, each an anatomy of its own; Niclaus’s seated Anthony, grave and exact. The costs: the Annunciation’s architecture is uncertain in its space, the tabernacle is fussy, and the shrine does not reach the painting’s level. Glazes that may be a restorer’s judgment are neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dead Christ of the closed view and the risen body of the first opening. They obey one law, the work’s own: the body is the site on which decay or light acts, and colour states which. The Temptation’s beasts and the Nativity’s light belong to it, and it holds through very different spaces: the hieratic scale of the Crucifixion, the visionary chapel of the Concert, the landscapes of the Visit. What resists is the shrine. Its gilded calm and earlier style obey the physics of the Upper Rhine retable of a generation before, not the painter’s. At the second opening two laws meet and are not made one. The range is wide; the seam is real.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders are held: the sacred, from Isaiah’s prophecy in the Annunciation through the Passion and the Resurrection; the body in sickness, on the cross and in the Temptation’s corner; the household, in the Nativity’s tub, jug and cradle and the torn cloth round the Child; the natural order, in the desert, the palm, the raven with its bread, the deer and the night sky; the demonic, in the Temptation; the institution, an order with its patron saints and its hospital; consciousness, in grief, astonishment, endurance and the sick man’s question. The openings place each order in one sequence, so they are integrated, not listed. Absent or faint: the state, labour beyond the household, and history between the desert fathers and the present.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, with The Sublime and The Living Form at 9.4. Colour handled as light and skin painted as decay, with the hands and the monsters each carrying meaning; elevation in terror and in radiance in every opening; and a hinged form in which the dying body is the closed state of a body whose open state is light.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. The first is held by the shrine, carved before the painting was conceived and built round rather than required; the second by a reach that came four centuries late, to a work whose painter had no school. Next above them, The Swerve, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.9: a departure with no recorded cost, the seam where the shrine’s earlier law meets the painting’s, and orders that stop short of the state and of labour. Three of the five limits are one fact: the altarpiece is two campaigns, and the painting was built round what it inherited.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the altarpiece as it stands in the chapel of the former Dominican convent that houses the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar: the painted wings by Matthias Grünewald (Mathis Gothart Nithart, d. 1528 at Halle), oil on limewood, c. 1512–1516, and the earlier carved, polychromed and gilded shrine and predella by Niclaus of Haguenau, scored together as one work in its three openings, as it stands, dismantled, after the cleaning of the painted panels completed in 2022. No image or written source was consulted. The carving is inside the unit, charged and credited with the painting, because the wings were made to close over it and open onto it. The casing, hinges and frame are lost; the loss, the dismantled display and the cleaning count only as facts of how the work survived, and nothing done by later hands is credited or charged to the makers. Not in the unit: the painter’s other works, among them the Crucifixion at Karlsruhe, which are context only. One inscription is quoted, the words beside the Baptist, John 3:30 in the Vulgate, as words and not as the letter forms on the panel; the titulus is given by its four letters; the paper in the Temptation is paraphrased, not quoted. The days on which each view was shown are given as the usual account has them. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the dimensions of the panels, the dates of the shrine, the patron of the painted campaign, the place of the joins between the doors, the extent of any lost carving above the shrine and the way the wings are now mounted, are not given.