Isenheim Altarpiece

Most altarpieces show one fixed image. The Isenheim Altarpiece was built to show several, folding open in stages so that its visible scene could change with the liturgical calendar, and each state was designed as its own complete composition rather than a partial view of a hidden whole.

Closed, on ordinary days, it shows Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion: a gaunt, greenish, wounded Christ hangs on a rough-hewn cross between the grieving Virgin, a wailing Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist's pointing hand, with the artist's trademark unsparing attention to torn, discoloured flesh. Opened once, on feast days, it reveals a gentler sequence: the Annunciation, a Nativity attended by a concert of angels, and a radiant Resurrection in which Christ rises glowing through the very tomb lid Grunewald shows shattering beneath him.

Opened a second time, on Saint Anthony's own feast day, the painted wings swing aside to expose Nikolaus Hagenauer's carved wooden shrine: a seated Saint Anthony flanked by the standing figures of Saints Augustine and Jerome, rendered in gilded relief rather than paint. The two remaining painted panels, now on the outer edge of this final state, show Anthony assaulted by grotesque demons and, in the calmer companion scene, Anthony meeting the hermit Paul in the desert. No other altarpiece from the period changes its entire visible subject this many times, and the sequence was never meant to be seen all at once; it was meant to be lived with across a year.

The Antonite order that commissioned this altarpiece did not run a general hospital. Its monks specialised in treating ergotism, a poisoning caused by a fungus that grows on rye and other grains and, when eaten in contaminated bread, produces burning limb pain, gangrene, seizures and hallucinations. Medieval sufferers called it Saint Anthony's Fire, after the desert saint the Antonites had adopted as their patron, and the monastery at Isenheim, fifteen miles from Colmar, was built specifically to house and treat its victims.

Guy Guers, the monastery's preceptor for over two decades, commissioned Grunewald and Hagenauer to furnish the hospital chapel with an altarpiece patients would actually see from their beds, and the imagery answers that brief directly rather than staying generic. Grunewald's Christ on the cross is not serenely idealised; his skin is mottled and greenish, his fingers curl in visible spasm, and several art historians have argued the discolouration deliberately echoes the gangrenous tissue damage ergotism itself produced, so that a dying patient looking at the crucified Christ saw a body marked the way their own body was marked.

That reading turns the altarpiece from simple decoration into something closer to visual medicine: a devotional image built to tell a suffering patient that their pain was shared rather than isolating, and that the Resurrection panel waiting behind the Crucifixion, radiant and whole, was the promised outcome of exactly that suffering. Few surviving altarpieces anywhere were built this specifically for the illness of the people who would pray in front of them.