I've described the appearance of this altarpiece when it was fully closed. Originally a huge wooden structure with a series of hinged panels that could fold out to reveal different scenes, it was taken apart during the French Revolution and is now shown as separate paintings. The cool nimbus of the solar disc, the red of Christ's stigmata, the gold of his beard, the gorgeously sculpted pale pink and blue of his robes - this painting's colours are some of the most brilliant in all art.
A delicately coloured watercolour landscape by Albrecht Altdorfer is among the many beautiful works in this exhibition that reveal the German Renaissance culture that produced it. For though it is now on French territory, the Isenheim altarpiece is a German painting to its marrow - German art's Sistine Chapel, even. You can see how this painting served the religious community of Isenheim and the sick they tried to treat.
Yet there is a quality to it that is utterly personal, and lacks any power to reassure. The religious experience his art records is a long, dark night of the soul. The white-bearded saint is pinned down by creatures that swarm from all sides. They have glassy, bulging eyes; one has the same sores and gangrene that disfigure Christ. Most eerie of all are the silhouettes on the skyline that emerge from a glowing, infernal ruin.
This image seems more meticulous, as if it is carefully recording a confession. You are inclined to take it as autobiography. In one panel, to the right of the crucifixion, a figure of St Anthony stands wisely by - except that a devil is crawling in through a broken window behind him.
It's another, even more confessional image of creeping madness: the terror at the window, the cracking of the glass by Something. And then there is the scariest scene of all, that same resurrection. This Christ is not human after all, and his return from death is not consoling. It is a shattering fact that changes human history and sends the soldiers guarding the tomb falling over their armour, sprawling in fear.
He painted his altarpiece on the eve of the Reformation, and in it you see a man thinking about religious images with the same intensity Martin Luther brought to the Bible; there is something convulsive here, at the start of more that a century of religious war. Faith is not easy, in this vision: it is violent and extreme. Otto Dix and George Grosz explicitly echo the twisting fingers and diseased body of his Christ in their paintings of disfigured first world war veterans. The bird-monster who beats St Anthony with a stick inspired the bird-demons of the surrealist Max Ernst.
Even Picasso painted a series of homages to it. Jerome and St. Below, in the carved predella, usually covered by a painted panel, a carved Christ stands at the center of seated apostles, six to each side, grouped in separate groups of three. The painted panels fold out to reveal three distinct ensembles. In its common, closed position the central panels close to depict a horrific, night-time Crucifixion.
The macabre and distorted Christ is splayed on the cross, his hands writhing in agony, his body marked with livid spots of pox. The Virgin swoons into the waiting arms of the young St. The flanking panels depict St. Sebastian, long known as a plague saint because of his body pocked by arrows, and St. Anthony Abbot. The second position emphasizes this promise of resurrection.
This time, the restoration team wants to do everything right. Pontabry says that a new generation of nano-particle gel has been used to clean the darkest parts. The paintings have also been screened by an optical coherence tomography machine that the Research and Restoration Centre acquired in More commonly used in ophthalmology, the device generates 3D images that can accurately map the inner structure of paint and varnish layers as thin as 0.
Isenheim altarpiece restorers invite visitors in. Laser imaging comes to aid of restoration of 16th-century paintings and sculptures. Vincent Noce.
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