Matthias Grunewald: The Complete Story
Matthias Grunewald (around 1470-1528) was the German painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, the most harrowing crucifixion in Western art, made for a hospital and kept today at the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar, France. Even his famous name is a mistake.
Barely ten of his paintings survive. They are enough to put him beside Durer, and nobody who stands in Colmar forgets it.
Matthias Grünewald at a glance
1470. Born around this year in Würzburg, as Mathis Gothart Nithart.
1510. In the service of the archbishops of Mainz as court painter and hydraulic engineer.
1516. Completed the Isenheim Altarpiece for a hospital monastery in Alsace.
1525. Left Mainz service in the year of the Peasants’ War.
1528. Died in Halle, employed at the end not as a painter but on the city’s waterworks.
A painting made for the sick
Between about 1512 and 1516 he painted the great altarpiece for the Antonine monastery at Isenheim, whose hospital treated victims of ergotism, the burning disease they called Saint Anthony's fire.
His Christ hangs covered in sores like theirs. Patients were brought before it so that the God they prayed to visibly shared their disease. No painting in Europe was ever aimed more precisely at its audience.
The wings that open
The altarpiece is a machine: wings open onto wings, from that night-black crucifixion to a Resurrection where Christ lifts off in a ball of light that has no parallel in the art of its time. The carved core is by Nicolas of Haguenau; everything painted is Grunewald at full power.
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The man with the wrong name
Here is the myth built into his very name: he was almost certainly called Mathis Gothart Nithart.
The name Grunewald was pinned on him by the biographer Joachim von Sandrart in 1675, a century and a half after his death, and it stuck.
He worked for the archbishops of Mainz, appears to have sided with the peasants in the 1525 uprising and lost his court position around then, and died in Halle in 1528.
The waterworks engineer
Painting was only half his employment. Grünewald served the Mainz court as a hydraulic engineer, designing fountains and water systems.
When the painting commissions stopped, the water knowledge fed him.
He died in Halle in 1528 while working on the city’s waterworks.
Grisaille wings for Dürer’s altar
For Frankfurt’s Heller Altarpiece, Dürer painted the famous center. Grünewald supplied outer wings, saints painted in gray on gray.
The two greatest German painters of the age, on one object, without collaboration or quarrel that anyone recorded.
Dürer’s center burned in 1729 and survives only in a copy. Grünewald’s wings survive.
The pamphlets in his trunk
After the Peasants’ War of 1525, Grünewald left the archbishop’s service.
When he died, Lutheran pamphlets and writings were found sealed among his belongings.
The painter of Catholicism’s most harrowing altarpiece seems to have leaned quietly toward the Reformation.
The Germans who rediscovered him
In 1917 the altarpiece was moved to Munich for safekeeping and exhibition, and German artists queued in front of it; the Expressionists claimed him as an ancestor on the spot. In 1934 Paul Hindemith built his symphony Mathis der Maler around him, music the Nazi regime promptly suppressed.
Where to see Grunewald
The Isenheim Altarpiece fills its own space at the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar, freshly restored in 2022. Smaller works hang in the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and Karlsruhe.
The Matthias Grunewald questions that keep coming up
What is Grunewald famous for? The Isenheim Altarpiece, painted around 1512-1516 for a hospital order.
Where is the Isenheim Altarpiece? At the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar, in eastern France.
Was Grunewald his real name? No. He was likely Mathis Gothart Nithart; the name Grunewald is a biographer's error from 1675.
How many of his works survive? Only about ten paintings, plus drawings.
Was Grünewald also an engineer? Yes. He served the Mainz court as a hydraulic engineer and died in Halle in 1528 while employed on the city’s waterworks.
Did Grünewald work with Dürer? Alongside him. He painted the grisaille wings for the Heller Altarpiece whose center panel was Dürer’s. The center burned in 1729; the wings survive.
More secrets to unlock
Famous under the wrong name
We do not call him by his name, we call him by a mistake, and the mistake now stands for the most powerful religious painting north of the Alps. Nithart would probably have taken the trade.
