The Isenheim altarpiece: God's medicine and the painter's vision (review)

178 Reviews force harnessed to the political needs of the ruling elite', (p. 18) and a man's world (pp. 33, 83, 128-32). The bibliography is comprehensive, but the work of Claudia Villa on Terence would help and the late J. B. Allen's The ethical poetic ofthe later Middle Ages would have broadened the author's awareness of the ethical imperative behind most study of Latin letters rather than simply grammar (e.g. pp. 102,106). At times,referenceto the pictorial would have assisted; for example, pp. 122-24 would have benefitted fromreferencetothe cycle of fable illustrations in the Perugian palazzo comunale (J. B. Riess Political ideals in medieval Italian art: thefrescoes in the Palazzo dei Priori, Perug [1297] [1981]). The index includes manuscripts. John O.Ward Department of History University of Sydney Hayum, Andree, 77ie Isenheim altarpiece: God's medicine and the painter's vision (Princeton essays on the Arts), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989; paper; pp. xviii, 199; 8 colour plates, 84 monochrome figures; R.R.P. ? This short monograph is, despite its brevity, well-researched and generally satisfying. The avowed intention is to examine Grunewald's famous polyptych in terms of the social, intellectual, and artistic climate in which it was produced, as well as in terms of its audience throughout the centuries. The second part of this brief takes the reader on a veritable Cook's Tour of recent methodological preoccupations, among which are reception theory and the death of the author/artist. The most successful sections are those in which Hayum advances her interpretation of the artwork, the meaning of which she asserts is linked to the hospital functions of the Antonine Order which commissioned the panels between 1508 and 1516. The panels were created to cover a sculpted shrine of Saint Anthony and have three possible arrangements: closed, open and middle. Hayum's thesis is that: 'the open state, with the narrative scenes of Saint Anthony, presents the condition of disease, along with the medical techniques for its alleviation. The closed Crucifixion state, outlining a phenomenology of death, allows for the possibility of divine intervention and of identification with the divine. The middle state arms us against the Reviews 179 mysterious forces of infection, offers the alternative route of psychophysical treatment, and shows us a gloriously imagined estate of the future' (p. 50). The altarpiece's status as a Catholic and sacramental artefact in a Reformation context is Hayum's starting point for the consideration of audience reaction. Grunewald's Catholic sensibility is contrasted with the Lutheran convictions of bis contemporary Durer. The startling artistic quality of the panels is acknowledged, and a very detaUed analysis of each panel is provided. The excellent colour plates enable the reader to follow Hayum's analysis step by step, and the monochrome figures illustrate her contextual arguments, being mostly works by other near-contemporary artists. Section IV, 'Afterlife of a monument', is generally less successful than the previous two, very detailed, sections. It is of necessity a fairly cursory survey of the decline into obscurity of the artist which led to the altarpiece being attributed to Durer in the seventeenth century, of the false persona 'Grunewald' being created for the artist, whose real name Nithart was only discovered from archival evidence at the beginning of the twentieth century, and of hisrehabilitationby Heinrich Schmid who published a monograph on the artist in 1911. Hayum notes the positive reception of Grunewald/Nithart by Expressionist artists such as Beckmann, Nolde, and Kandinsky, whose On the spiritual in art elicited a strong popular response immediately prior to the Fhst World War. The altarpiece's public life began in 1917, when it was moved to Munich for conservation, and was subsequentiy exhibited to the public. One result of this is the debt to it acknowledged by Picasso in his 1933 drawings for Guernica. The lasttenpages are a rather messy meander through the Nazi reaction to Grunewald, through Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, and through Albert Schweitzer's and Erwin Panofsky's reaction to the altarpiece. This less than satisfying conclusion does not, however, undermine the valuable contribution this monograph makes to the study of a masterpiece. Carole Cusack...