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Mathias Grünewald belongs to the family of Bosch, Brueghel and Schongauer. His paintings are born of the mystery of the supernatural, and exhibit teeming life and hideous, demonic creations, as we see in these details from The Temptation of Saint Anthony. One of the nine panels Grünewald executed for the altar piece of Issenheim, this painting reprises a favorite subject of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the hermit saint assailed by the entire arsenal of infernal monsters representing every weakness, every ugly human failing. It is a subject rich in implications for the fantastic, staging the drama of the double, the riddle of the hallucinatory or altered state of mind, and, not least, the problems of evil and of guilt. The theme would be revived in the nineteenth century, the golden age of the Fantastic, most notably by Flaubert. It would then tempt, in its turn, numerous book illustrators. |
