Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altar and German Passion Mysticism

• In Event: Raging Pain, Radiating Glory: Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in German-Jewish Thought

Abstract

Already in the fourteenth century, German speaking Christians evince a particularly twisted fascination with the bodily torture of Christ’s death. Key details found in Grünewald’s image seem almost precise renderings of Margaret Ebner’s own imitation of Christ’s suffering, for example, and further parallels can be found through out the later Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century, culminating in the bloody phantasmorgia of Anne Emmerich’s Passion narrative, a key source for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This paper will situate Grünewald’s image within this textual and imagistic context.

Author

• Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School