On Good Friday,I posted a picture of Christ on the Cross from the altarpiece in the chapel St. Anthony’s hospital in Isenheim, Germany. The painting, by Matthias Grünewald is grisly and heart-rending, depicting the suffering and deadness of the crucified Jesus.
In addition to His own wounds, Jesus’ body is covered with sores, like the patients dying of plague or St. Anthony’s fire who prayed in that chapel. This was to illustrate this Bible verse, the Septuagint rendition of Isaiah 53: 4, after a description of Jesus’ healings: “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took our illnesses and bore our diseases'” (Matthew 8:17). (Does this mean that when Jesus healed people, He took their diseases into Himself, as He would with their sins?)
The Crucifixion is painted on the outside of the altarpiece, but then, if you open up it up, you see this:
(The discussion continues after the jump, along with a detail from the painting and a detail from Grünewald’s life)
The same Christ who was so dead in the one painting is now triumphantly alive. His wounds from the Cross are still visible. But the sores are gone. Just as the sores of the dying patients will be gone. Just as their sins will be gone–when they too rise again.
Christ’s face is depicted as a source of light. This depicts what was said in John’s Gospel: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5). And, indeed, the light of Christ shines in every darkness.
The Wikipedia entry for Matthias Grünewald, who lived from 1470 to 1528, says that one of the few contemporary references to him is by Phillipp Melanchthon and that “he had some Lutheran pamphlets and papers at his death.” So he might well be counted as a Lutheran artist. He certainly understood the Theology of the Cross.
A detail from the painting:
Painting by Grunewald, retable d’Isenheim (http://www.eldritchpress.org/jkh/gr7.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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