The Altarpiece Nobody Was Meant to Enjoy

In a small monastery hospital in Isenheim, France, the sick and dying were carried past a painting that would change how they understood suffering. Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, completed around 1516, depicts the crucifixion with a rawness that still shocks viewers five centuries later.

Unlike the serene, almost beautiful crucifixions painted by his contemporaries, Grünewald refused to sanitize the cross. Christ's body is covered in welts and thorns. His fingers twist in agony. His skin has the greenish pallor of genuine death. The monks who commissioned this piece ministered to patients ravaged by ergotism, a disease that blackened and blistered the flesh. They wanted those patients to look up from their cots and see a Savior who knew their pain from the inside.

But here is what makes this painting extraordinary. The altarpiece has hinged panels. When opened on Easter, the tortured body gives way to a radiant resurrection scene, bathed in golden light. The same wood that held the suffering held the glory. You could not get to the second image without passing through the first.

Grünewald sacrificed artistic convention — the expectation that sacred art should be lovely and composed — because he understood something vital. A beautiful crucifixion comforts no one who is actually suffering. Only an honest one can.

The cross was never meant to be decorative. It was meant to meet us in the worst moment of our lives and whisper, "I have been here too."