The Isenheim Altarpiece: When Christ Catches the Plague
Christ is covered in pustules. Grünewald paints disease and suffering for plague victims.
By Artedusa
••12 min read
The Isenheim Altarpiece: When Christ Catches the Plague
Christ is covered in pustules. His greenish, cadaverous body is riddled with splinters. His fingers are deformed, twisted by gangrene. His lips are blue. His skin is black in places, as if rotting from within. This isn't the idealized Christ of Italian Renaissance, muscled and beautiful even in death. This is a corpse. A plague victim. A body destroyed by disease.
, painted by Matthias Grünewald between 1512 and 1516, isn't made to be beautiful. It's made for the sick. For the dying. For those agonizing from plague, ergotism, syphilis in an isolated monastery-hospital in Alsace. It tells them: look. Christ also suffered like you. His wounds resemble yours. His flesh rots like yours. You're not alone in your agony.
The Isenheim Altarpiece
It's the most terrifying artwork of the 16th century. And also the most compassionate. Grünewald paints the horror of suffering without diverting it, without beautifying it, without lying. He looks it in the face. And he transforms it into salvation.
Isenheim, 1512: Hospital of the Damned
The Antonine monastery-hospital in Isenheim, Alsace, specializes in treating two incurable diseases: ergotism (called "Saint Anthony's fire") and plague.
Ergotism is poisoning caused by ergot of rye, parasitic fungus infecting cereals. When you eat contaminated bread, you develop atrocious symptoms: hallucinations, convulsions, gangrene of extremities. Fingers and toes blacken, rot, fall off. Skin covers with pustules. You die slowly, in unspeakable suffering.
Plague, it returns in epidemic waves since the 14th century. Purulent buboes. Delirious fever. Blood coughing. Death in days. Doctors can do nothing. The Church says it's divine punishment. The sick are isolated, rejected, condemned.
The Antonines welcome these condemned. They care for them—or rather, they accompany their agony. They give them a bed. Bread (uncontaminated). Prayers. And they show them the altarpiece.
The altarpiece is installed in the hospital chapel. It's a monumental polyptych—several articulated panels that can be opened and closed according to liturgical feasts. Closed, it shows the Crucifixion. Opened once, it reveals the Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection. Fully opened, it unveils hermit saints and scenes from Saint Anthony's life.
But it's the Crucifixion the sick see permanently. Because it's the one that speaks to them. It's the one that tells them: I know what you endure.
The Crucifixion: Anatomy of Agony
The central Crucifixion panel is immense (2.69 × 3.07 meters). The crucified Christ dominates, disproportionately large compared to other figures. It's not a perspective question. It's symbolic. Christ is giant because his suffering is giant.
His body is twisted. Arms pulled to the extreme by weight, shoulders dislocated. Fingers spread, clenched in agony spasm. Feet nailed one atop the other, body weight resting on the nail piercing bones.
But what strikes is the skin. It's greenish. Grayish. Like a corpse beginning to decompose. It's riddled with small black marks—traces of flagellation, but also, perhaps, plague pustules, ergot splinters. Christ bears the symptoms of the sick watching him.
His lips are blue. Cyanosis. Oxygen lack. He suffocates. Crucifixion kills by progressive asphyxiation. The crucified can no longer breathe, pulled arms preventing lungs from dilating. He dies slowly, suffocated.
His hands are deformed. Fingers twisted, arched skyward like claws. It's not natural. It's gangrene. Ergotism. Extremities dying before the body.
Blood flows. Black. Thick. Not bright red like in Italian Crucifixions. Black like dead blood. Like rotten blood.
Grünewald doesn't seek beauty. He seeks medical truth. He paints a corpse. A real one. With real symptoms of death by crucifixion, complicated by diseases the Antonines treat. Christ becomes plague victim. Becomes ergotic. So the sick can identify.
Left of the cross, Mary collapses in Saint John the Evangelist's arms. She doesn't weep dignifiedly. She faints. Her body becomes soft, white, bloodless. She symbolically dies with her son.
Mary Magdalene, kneeling at the cross's foot, wrings her hands in desperate prayer. Her interlaced fingers strangely resemble Christ's clenched fingers. She physically shares his pain.
Right, John the Baptist (who died before the Crucifixion, so his presence is symbolic) points a disproportionately long finger toward Christ. An immense, disproportionate, impossible finger. He says: look. Ecce Homo. Behold the man. Behold God made flesh. Behold absolute suffering.
At his feet, a lamb holds a cross. From its chest gushes blood flowing into a chalice. Eucharistic symbol. Christ's blood becoming bread and wine. Suffering becoming sacrament.
The Black Background: Nothingness
Behind the scene, nothingness. Absolute black background. No landscape. No sky. Just total darkness. Golgotha is nowhere and everywhere. It's symbolic space. A mental place. The place of pure suffering.
This black background recalls Caravaggio, but Grünewald paints a century before the Italian master. Tenebrism already existed in German Gothic art. This capacity to make bodies surge from darkness like apparitions.
Black says: there's nothing else. No consolation. No reassuring decor. Just suffering and emptiness. That's what the sick feel. Their world has reduced to pain and waiting for death.
But black also says: focus on Christ. Look at nothing else. His suffering is the only thing that matters. It contains all sufferings. It redeems them.
The Resurrection: Light Explosion
When you open the altarpiece, the Crucifixion disappears. You discover other panels. Right, the Resurrection.
The contrast is violent. Brutal. Salvific.
The resurrected Christ explodes from the tomb in a golden light blast. His body is no longer greenish and putrefied. It's luminous, translucent, almost immaterial. His wounds shine like jewels. He no longer bears disease symptoms. He's healed. Transfigured. Glorified.
Around him, Roman soldiers fall, blinded by light. They can't bear it. It's too violent, too pure, too dazzling.
Christ's shroud floats behind him like wings. Or like aurora borealis. Color streaks—green, red, orange, blue—cross the night sky. It's almost abstract. Almost modern. A 16th-century Turner.
The message to the sick is clear: suffering isn't the end. After Crucifixion comes Resurrection. After illness comes healing. Not necessarily here below. Perhaps in the hereafter. But it comes.
Christ knew the worst suffering. And he came out of it. Transformed. Glorified. You too will come out.
It's a promise. Not cheap consolation. A promise founded on shared experience. Christ knows what suffering is. He passed through it. He awaits you on the other side.
Grünewald the Unknown: The Forgotten Master
We know almost nothing about Matthias Grünewald. He's the great forgotten master of German Renaissance, eclipsed by his contemporary Albrecht Dürer.
Grünewald isn't even his real name. He was probably called Mathis Gothart Nithart. "Grünewald" is a 17th-century misattribution that stuck. We call him by a false name.
He was born around 1470-1480. He died in 1528, probably in Halle. Between the two, almost nothing. A few archival documents. A few commissions. A few paintings—barely a dozen attributed to him with certainty.
He works for the Archbishop of Mainz. He paints altarpieces. He designs fountains. He makes soaps—yes, soaps, he was also artisan-chemist. Then he disappears from archives. Probably died from the plague he'd painted so well.
His work falls into oblivion. For three centuries, nobody talks about Grünewald. The Isenheim Altarpiece remains in its Alsatian chapel. A few pilgrims see it. A few sick die before it. But the art world ignores it.
Only in the 19th century, with German Romanticism and Gothic art rediscovery, is Grünewald rehabilitated. Romantic writers discover him. They see in him a visionary genius, a mystic, a painter of German soul.
In the 20th century, Grünewald becomes a cult figure. German Expressionists—Otto Dix, Max Beckmann—recognize an ancestor in him. He painted horror and suffering unfiltered, unbeautified. He refused classical beauty for raw truth. That's exactly what Expressionists do after World War I.
Composer Paul Hindemith writes an opera about him: Mathis the Painter (1938). An opera about a painter we know almost nothing about. An opera about the artist facing world violence.
The Color of Suffering
Grünewald is a genius colorist. But he doesn't use color like Italians. No harmony. No subtle gradations. He uses violent, garish, dissonant colors.
In the Crucifixion, Christ's greenish body contrasts with John's intense red cloak, Mary's cadaverous white, the acid green of distant landscape. Nothing matches. Everything screams.
In the Resurrection, it's chromatic explosion. Golden yellow. Burning orange. Blood red. Night blue. Emerald green. Colors don't mix. They violently coexist, like in stained glass.
Grünewald paints as a stained glass painter would transpose his technique onto wood panel. Pure color areas. Brutal contrasts. Unreal luminosity.
He also uses rare and expensive pigments. Lapis lazuli for blues. Malachite for greens. Cochineal for reds. Golds and silvers. The altarpiece is a precious object. A treasure. Not just artistic. Material too.
The sick watching this altarpiece saw something they'd never see elsewhere in their miserable lives. Beauty. Wealth. Pure color. The world refused them everything. The Church offered them this. This explosion of light and rare pigments.
The Pestilent Christ: Medical Compassion
Why paint Christ with sick people's symptoms? It's a profound theological question.
Incarnation—God becoming man—means God accepts all flesh weaknesses. Hunger. Thirst. Fatigue. Pain. And therefore, disease.
By painting Christ with pustules, Grünewald says: God knew your disease. He carried it. He endured it. You're not abandoned. You're not punished. You're like Christ.
It's profoundly subversive. Official Church says disease is sin punishment. That the sick must repent. That their suffering is deserved.
Grünewald says the opposite. He says: Christ was also sick. And he hadn't sinned. Disease isn't a fault. It's a trial. And God shares it.
This medical compassion—almost clinical—is revolutionary. Grünewald paints a Christ who truly resembles the sick. Not symbolically. Truly. Anatomically. Dermatologically.
It's a form of medical realism serving theology. Christ becomes diagnosis. Becomes symptom. Becomes medical body as much as mystical body.
The Antonines used this altarpiece as therapeutic tool. Not in modern sense—they didn't think looking at an image physically heals. But they knew it heals psychologically. Spiritually.
Dying alone in fear and rejection is hell. Dying accompanied, recognized, identified with Christ who suffered like you, is bearable. It's almost a privilege. You imitate Christ. Your agony has meaning.
Colmar, 1794: The Altarpiece Survives
French Revolution arrives in Alsace. Monasteries are closed. Church properties are seized. Isenheim monastery is dissolved in 1792.
The altarpiece is dismantled. Its panels are separated. They could have been destroyed, sold, dispersed. But a revolutionary administrator, himself sick, decides to save them. He has them transported to Colmar, to the municipal library.
Then to Unterlinden Museum, former Dominican convent transformed into museum. That's where the altarpiece still is today. Panels have been reassembled—not exactly as originally, but so all can be seen.
Millions of visitors come each year. Not to see a Renaissance masterpiece. To see this pestilent Christ. This greenish corpse. This suffering painted with implacable honesty.
Many leave overwhelmed. Some cry. Others are repulsed. Nobody's indifferent.
What the Pustulous Christ Still Says
Five hundred years after its creation, the Isenheim Altarpiece still speaks to the sick. Not of plague or ergotism. Of cancer. AIDS. Chronic pain. All diseases that destroy the body and socially isolate.
Grünewald painted dignity in decrepitude. He refused to look away. He looked disease in the face and painted it without lying.
The greenish Christ says: your rotting body isn't shameful. Your suffering isn't punishment. You're not alone. You're not abandoned.
It's an insanely radical message. In a world valuing youth, beauty, health, Grünewald celebrates the sick body. He sacralizes it. He says: this destroyed body is holy. Because Christ inhabited it.
The Resurrection that follows promises healing. Not necessarily here. Not necessarily now. But it promises suffering isn't the end.
The altarpiece remains in Colmar. The sick continue coming. Not all believers. Not all Christians. But all seeking something. Recognition, perhaps. Validation. Someone who looked suffering in the face and painted it without lying.
Grünewald died five hundred years ago. Probably from the plague he'd painted. His body rotted like Christ's body he'd represented.
But the altarpiece remains. The pustulous Christ remains. He looks at the sick. He tells them: I know.
And it's enough.
The Isenheim Altarpiece: When Christ Catches the Plague | Art History
