FORESHADOW
  • Home
  • Magazine
    • Contents
    • Foresight
  • Podcast
  • Resources
  • About
    • People
    • Works
    • Support Us

Grunewald's Crucifixion

26/9/2022

0 Comments

 
By Alan Altany

Picture
Art: The Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured,
While we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted.

                                                                                                    Isaiah 53:4


In the chapel of the monastery’s hospital,
the pure stench of boiling & erupting skin,
going black gangrenous by the moment,
rose up with a cacophony of suffered moans
from the peasant patients grimly enduring
St. Anthony’s fire, leprosy and plague
as the monks cared for them and brought
their brutally fouled bodies and afflicted souls
before the painted Christ altarpiece, before
the magnificent ugliness of a crucified Jesus
who mirrored and consumed their own wounds,
compelling their death-draining eyes towards
this tortured, contorted figure perfectly abandoned,
perfectly and savagely killed in frozen writhing:
common people with commonly searing pustules,
seizures, crunching spasms and hallucinations
facing this night-drenched painting, this Christ.
               
Grunewald painted in the hospital 
for years, daily seeing the stricken-  
down in their fatally drenched beds, 
stretching faith beyond breaking.
His Christ: greyish–green flesh,
gaping mouth, grave-blue lips,
screaming hands, legions of sores
heavy with death, a dead Jesus.
This God of excess died like no other
in dreadful beauty & unrestrained love,
unrestricted, eternal empathy
for His sin-corpsed, absurd humans,
God now knowing their desolation and
the terminal loneliness of their pain.

Mother Mary, right of Jesus on the panel,
collapses in John’s arms next to
Mary Magdalene praying, begging;
a decreasing John the Baptist to the left
points fiercely to Jesus to increase.

The whole chapel is a visceral scene
gravitating everyone towards
a gruesome, hideous Christ:   
eyes shut, head awfully dropped;
a 16th-century painting intending
miracles of body and faith
by the execution of
infinite compassion.
Patients sense
a mystical transfiguration
of their poor dyings
into acts of worship
to the God who knew them
with a mothering intimacy,

seeing He sought them more deeply
than their abysses, so deeply
that hope found a way out of hell
into hearts bowing before the infinite
sacrifice of God, where He agonized
in love for them and died so that
they could finally become soulful fire
ascending to be with the risen Christ
in their new spirited-skin bodies.

Jesus’s darkest night ever of any soul:
a high point of art
marked by the healing of tormented hearts
of pushed down-and-out believers
through a polyptych painting
by a man whose name was
not even Grunewald, but who
had been touched by the reflected
heat of St. Anthony’s fire and by the
God of miracle-making who envisioned
the painted panel itself into a miracle
of a dramatically hidden resurrection,
healing through immersion in death.

Alan Altany, Ph.D., is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc. He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred. His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.  

'Grunewald's Crucifixion' first appeared in 
A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred. It has been republished here with the author's permission.

Related work on Foreshadow:
The Crucifixion of St Peter (Fiction, August 2022)

Please support us by sharing this post and buying us a book. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Art
    Editorial
    Fiction
    Forethought
    Interview
    Music
    Non-fiction
    Photography
    Poetry
    Review

    RSS Feed

    Forecast

    Support Us

    Picture

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020

Home
Magazine
Contents
Foresight
Podcast
Resources
About
People
Works
Support Us
Connect with Foreshadow
Buy us a coffee
© COPYRIGHT 2020–2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • Magazine
    • Contents
    • Foresight
  • Podcast
  • Resources
  • About
    • People
    • Works
    • Support Us