The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision
by Andrée Hayum Princeton University Press, 199 pp., $29.95 The
Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald’s
Altarpiece I/University of California Press by Ruth Mellinkoff
California Studies in the History of Art, Discovery Series, 109
pp., $39.95 In February 1793 the revolutionary government of
France closed down the convent of the order of Saint Anthony at
Isenheim in upper Alsatia. The commissioners of the French
Republic charged with confiscating the monastery’s furniture
decided that the paintings and carvings from the high altar in
the church should be conserved as outstanding works of art and
transferred to nearby Colmar, the capital of the newly founded
Department of the “Haut-Rhin.” This decision, far from usual in
those days of Jacobin iconoclasm, saved one of the greatest, and
the most mysterious, works of German art, an altarpiece painted
on the eve of the Reformation. The fame of the Isenheim
altarpiece came late,