by Rorate Contributor
Maureen Mullarkey
Stay awhile, please, with the
Isenheim Altarpiece. It has no equal
in Western art. Grünewald makes palpable that mystic strain in the medieval
mind that prompted Hugh of St. Victor to write: “Logic, mathematics, physics
teach some truth, yet do not reach that truth wherein is the soul’s safety,
without which all else is in vain.”
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| [Grünewald. The Resurrection wing of the Isenheim Altarpiece (1516)] |
Hinged to the central Incarnation panel, the Resurrection wing is the theological capstone
of the ensemble. Grünewald’s Risen One appears neither in light nor against it
as routinely depicted. Here, the luminous flesh of the Eternal Word is light
itself: God of God, Light of Light. Like a solar flare, the Nicene figure generates
its own sudden brilliance. Phosphorescence shatters the dark. The gates of hell—death—splinter
with it. Roman soldiers, keepers of the power of the world, collapse in the force
of the eruption.
The mystery of this explosive
moment can only be suggested. No one witnessed it. The summit of it lies
beyond. Color is Grünewald’s sole agent of suggestion. He gives us the colors
of a sunrise, galvanic energy bursting in to the cosmic void. Gone is the
conventional white winding cloth. Just as sunlight causes certain salts to
oxidize and turn color, so the light of the Resurrection transfigures the
sheeting. A rainbow current—an electromagnetic spectrum—runs through it. (This,
a century and a half before Newton’s experiments yielded understanding of color
as a component of sunlight.)
A mandalic circle, wreathed
with the flicker of distant stars, radiates from the figure and surrounds it. Christ
raises his arms in that gesture, at once juridical and triumphant, so familiar in
sacred art. We see it carved on the relief of Christ in Majesty on the
thirteenth century frieze of the Last Judgment portal of Notre Dame and on
countless mosaics.
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| [Christ in Majesty] |
Compare Grünewald’s rendering
with the Resurrection panel of Titian’s oft-imitated Averoldi
Altarpiece. Commissioned by the papal delegate to Venice, Altobello
Averoldi, it is gorgeously painted but conventional in spirit. Conventional,
that is, in terms of Renaissance preoccupations. Here is a thoroughly material
Christ, a robust specimen of male anatomy in the age of Vesalius. The sacred
theme offers pretext for a monument to male beauty.
 |
[Vesalius. De humani corporis
fabrica (1543)]
|
Titian studied previous
compositions of the subject, enlivening the motif with the dynamism of a figure
set on a slant, its diagonal accented by outflung arms, and the billowing
Crusader flag. Scrupulously realistic, the Averoldi Christ is lit as by a
spotlight from above. (Note the placement of shadows on the body.) Posture and
gesture appear arrested in dance. The flag is a call to arms. Where Grünewald’s
eye was on the ineffable, Titian’s was on the tangible. And the temporal.
(Bishop Averoldi was in Venice to muster support for Leo X’s intended crusade
against the Turks.)
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[Titian. Averoldi Altarpiece
(1522)]
A Resurrection scene was a
set piece. Titian himself was more invested in the subsidiary figure of St.
Sebastian created for the lower right panel of the polyptych. He rehearsed the
torsion of the figure and its musculature in numerous preparatory drawings. In
his own eyes, the pierced saint was the best thing he had painted so far.
|
 |
[Titian. St. Sebastian panel
of the altarpiece.]
|
The greatness of the Titian
lies in the splendor of the painter’s own hand—his drawing, pictorial
intelligence, tonal mastery, all the lovely stuff of it. But it prompts
admiration for artistry more than it summons a sense of the sacred.
By contrast, the Isenheim Altarpiece, completed a scant
four years before Titian began Averoldi’s commission, preserves the emphasis of
medieval piety on ascent from what reason grasps—the data, logic and structure
of things—to realities unknowable through reason alone. Grünewald’s Resurrection affirms the Orthodox distinction
between sacred art and “religious” art, or secular art that makes use of sacred
themes but is empty of a true sense of transcendence.
While not an icon, Grünewald’s
Resurrection observes the icon
painter’s disregard of shadow. Like an iconographer—or an artist in stained
glass—he uses color, born of light, as a window on the eternal. He puts before
our eyes St. John’s incandescent utterance: “In Him was life, and the life was
the light of men.”
Note: To read The Isenheim Altarpiece, Part I, click here.
Maureen Mullarkey is a Senior
Contributor to The Federalist. She
keeps the weblog Studio Matters.
