Isenheim Altarpiece

Few images of the Crucifixion are this harrowing. Christ's body hangs torn and pocked with sores, the skin greenish, the fingers clawing at the air, the cross bowing under his dead weight; the Virgin faints in white, the Magdalene wrings her hands, and John the Baptist points across to him beside a bleeding lamb, lettered with his words, He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30). Grunewald painted it for a monastery hospital at Isenheim that nursed victims of skin disease and plague - sufferers who saw here a God whose flesh was ravaged like their own. It is the agonized counter-pole to Italian grace, the destination his earlier Mocking of Christ in this collection already pointed toward.