This masterpiece of European art would probably be more famous if we knew more about its creator. People like a work of art with a good story attached, such as Michelangelo and his struggle to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In the case of Matthias Grünewald, even the artist's real name is uncertain. "Grünewald" is a moniker attached more than a century after his lifetime to an artist whose scant biography typifies a late-medieval world where artists were still essentially jobbing craftsmen.
The exhibition at Colmar illuminates the richness of German Renaissance art, yet only one of the artists here, Albrecht Dürer, rose to the status of a modern, self-conscious artist who wrote books and voiced opinions. By contrast, the painter hidden behind the name Matthias Grünewald comes down to us only in a few bare details. He was probably a professional artist called Mathis Gothard Nithart, although some claim instead he was Mathis Grün, who - rather appropriately - suffered from the plague and was a melancholiac. Most people, though, equate Grünewald with Nithart.
Nithart/Grünewald was born in Würzburg in about 1475. He made paintings for churches in western Germany, and died in 1528. One hint of his personality is that he seems to have specialised in crucifixions. Another can be found in his charcoal drawings, which suggest a man introspectively involved in his work.
But the greatest revelation of his personality is the altarpiece. He made it in collaboration with a woodcarver called Nicolas de Haguenau, whose sculptures of saints, donors and disciples were kept in this folding structure.
But Haguenau's work lacks personality and soul. It is these qualities that are so striking in the painted panels, raising the paradox that a man of whom we know so little left such a profound visual record of his emotional state. The personality of Matthias Grünewald, whoever he was, is recorded by the Isenheim altarpiece. Despite his obscurity, this work was enough to inspire an opera about his life: Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler.