Matthias Grünewald was a German painter, born around 1470 or 1480 and dead in 1528, who made the Isenheim Altarpiece, a Crucifixion painted for a hospital where the sick were treated for ergotism. His Christ, covered in sores, is the picture people travel to Colmar, France, to see. Even his name is a mistake: he was most likely called Mathis Gothart Nithart.
Barely ten of his paintings survive. They are enough to put him among the great painters of his age, and nobody who stands in front of the altarpiece forgets it.
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The altarpiece lived two lives. On ordinary days its wings stayed shut, and what the sick of the hospital saw was the Crucifixion: a Christ with a body covered in wounds and thorns. The monks who ran the hospital treated Saint Anthony's fire, the disease now called ergotism.
The museum that keeps it today says the image was meant to terrify the patients and to comfort them in the same moment, because the Savior shared their suffering. The picture of healing, a Resurrection, was hidden behind it and appeared only on major feast days, when the wings opened.
The man who painted all this left almost nothing about himself. Nobody called him Grünewald in his lifetime. He turns up in a pay petition, a castle, a city's waterworks, and in the end in the books left in his estate.
What You'll Discover
Why his famous name is a mistake.
What he painted for Dürer's altar.
Who the Crucifixion was really for.
What opened on feast days only.
How a painter ended on the waterworks.
What was found among his books.