Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
Mysteries of a Masterpiece
By Willibald Sauerländer
The Isenheim Altarpiece: God's Medicine and the Painter's Vision
by Andrée Hayum
Princeton University Press, 199 pp., $29.95
The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald's Altarpiece I/University of California Press
by Ruth Mellinkoff
California Studies in the History of Art, Discovery Series, 109 pp., $39.95
In February 1793 the revolutionary government of France closed down the convent of the order of Saint Anthony at Isenheim in upper Alsatia. The commissioners of the French Republic charged with confiscating the monastery's furniture decided that the paintings and carvings from the high altar in the church should be conserved as outstanding works of art and transferred to nearby Colmar, the capital of the newly founded Department of the 'Haut-Rhin.' This decision, far from usual in those days of Jacobin iconoclasm, saved one of the greatest, and the most mysterious, works of German art, an altarpiece painted on the eve of the Reformation.
Review, 4414 words
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