Matthias Grunewald

Rating:
Summary: Will the real Matthias Grunewald please stand up?
Review: Possibly 26 paintings and 37 drawings by MATTHIAS GRUNEWALD made safe passage. Others didn't. In 1789 revolutionary mobs went after his late Gothic Isenheim altarpiece. An altarpiece panel went missing from a Frankfurt museum 36 years after.

Grunewald became unknown in art history. But he came back, thanks to Heinrich Alfred Schmid in 1911 and Walter Karl Zulch in 1938. In fact, records in Aschaffenburg and Seligenstadt, plus studies by Alfred Schadler and Bernhard Saran, have left us with 4 Masters Mathis to choose from!

So was the artist Master Mathis, carver in Seligenstadt? Or was he Master Mathis of Aschaffenburg, also hydraulic engineer of the Klopp castle artesian well in Bingen? Or was he Master Mathis of Grun, carver, painter or sculptor in Frankfurt? Or was he Master Mathis, architectural painter and gilder in Aschaffenburg?

Even with the author's answer, we've no record of Grunewald's journeymanship, apprenticeship, or pre-mastership. How did Grunewald paint the first European realistic total solar eclipse, in the Mainz small crucifixion? The only eclipse during his lifetime was on October 1, 1502. It was seen only in the Brandenburg marches, Lusatia, Mecklenburg, Silesia and southern Poland.

And how did he come up with his tempera medium? It used little oil, for boldly spreading colors and subtle changes. That was only done by the colorist Master of Wittingau, Bohemia.

Finally, his art had Bohemian, French, Italian and Netherlandish touches. Did the lack of colored center and the modulated local color in The mocking of Christ mean that he studied with Hans Holbein the Elder, the great colorist of Augsburg? Why was Judas standing alone, Leonardo da Vinci-style, in The last supper?

Why was the Isenheim Calvary painted, da Vinci-like, in brightest light? Why did Christ turn out his palms, Raphael- and Verrocchio-like, to show his wounds in the Isenheim Resurrection? Where did the Isenheim central panel get the angel concert from? They were painted in France, as of Jean Pucelle's Book of hours. The roofless golden temple was like Melchior Broederlam's Dijon altarpiece and the Breisach minster roodscreen in Alsace. Why were there Hieronymus Bosch-like light rays from God in the Isenheim Incarnation?

Horst Ziermann's book perfectly preps Ruth Mellinkoff's THE DEVIL AT ISENHEIM and Gottfried Richter's THE ISENHEIM ALTAR.