Winfried Sebald - After Nature

Panthaleon, Aegidius, Cyriax, Christopher and

Erasmus and the truly beautiful

St. Vitus with the cockerel,

each look in different

directions without knowing

why. The three female saints

Barbara, Catherine and Margaret on

the other hand hide at the edge

of the left panel behind the back of

St. George putting together their

uniform oriental heads for a conspiracy against the men.

The misfortune of saints

is their sex, is the terrible

separation of the sexes which Grunewald

suffered in his own person. The exorcised

devil that Cyriax, not only because

of the narrow confines, holds raised

high as an emblem in

the air is a female being

and, as a grisaille of Grunewald’s

in the Frankfurt Stadel shows in

the most drastic of fashions, derives from

Diocletian’s epileptic daughter,

the misshapen princess Artemia whom

Cyriax, as beside him she kneels on

the ground, holds tightly leashed

with a maniple of his vestments

like a dog. Spreading out

above them is the branch work

of a fig tree with fruit, one of which

is entirely hollowed out by insects.

Little is known of the life of

Matthaeus Grunewald of Aschaffenburg.

The first account of the painter

in Joachim von Sandrart’s German Academy

of the year 1675 begins with the notice

that the author knows not one person living

who could provide a written or oral

testimony of that praiseworthy hand.

We may trust that report by Sandrart,

for a portrait in a Wurzburg museum

has preserved him, aged eighty-two,

wide awake and with eyes uncommonly clear.

Lightly in grey and black,

he writes, Matthaeus had painted the outer

wings of an altarpiece made by Durer

of Mary’s ascension in the

Preachers’ convent in Frankfurt and

thus had lived at around 1505.

Exceedingly strange was the trans-

figuration of Christ on Mount Tabor

limned by him in watercolours, especially

one cloud of wondrous beauty, wherein

above the Apostles convulsed

with awe, Moses and Elijah appear,

a marvel surpassed.

Then in the Mainz cathedral

there had been three altar panels

with facing fronts and reverse

sides painted, one of them

showing a blind hermit who, as he crosses

the frozen Rhine river with a boy

to guide him, is assaulted by two murderers

and beaten to death. Anno 1631 or ’32,

this panel in the wild war of that era

had been taken away and sent off to Sweden

but by shipwreck beside many other

such pieces of art had perished

in the depths of the sea.

At Isenheim, Sandrart had not been,

but had heard of the altar-work there,

which, he writes, was so fashioned that

real life could scarce have been other

and where, it was said, a St. Anthony with

demons meticulously drawn was to be seen.

Except for a St.John with hands clasped

of which he, Sandrart, when at one time in Rome

he was counterfeiting the pope, had caught sight,

with certainty this was all that was not lost

of the work of the Aschaffenburg

painter of whom, besides, he knew only

that most of the time he had

resided in Mainz, led a reclusive

melancholy life and been ill-married.

We know there is a long tradition

of persecuting the Jews, in the City

of Frankfurt as in other places.

Around 1240, the records tell us,

173 were either slaughtered

or died of their own free will

in a conflagration. In 1349

the Flagellant Brothers instituted

a great massacre in the Jewish quarter.

Again, the chronicles tell that the Jews

burned themselves and that

after the fire there was a clear view from

the Cathedral Hill over to Sachsenhausen.

Thereafter the Jews only hesitantly

returned to the city on the Main.

In the mid-fifteenth century

a clothing statute is issued,

yellow rings to be worn on the tunic,

later a grey circle the size of

an apple, for the prevention of all

carnal intercourse between Christians

and Jews, for a long time to come

under the pain of death.

Then, at the expense of Frankfurt’s

high city council, in the train

of civic reform, progressive order

and hygienisation, a ghetto of their own

is built for the Jews by the Wollgraben,

fourteen houses and a new synagogue.

By Grunewald’s time, we learn,

there are twenty-three houses, and soon

the district counts more than three thousand souls

without the boundaries having been widened.

Each night-on Sundays at four in the

afternoon-they were locked up, and

might not walk into any place

where a green tree grew,

not on the Scheidewall

nor in the Ross, nor on the Romerberg

or in the Avenue. In this ghetto

the Jewess Enchin had been raised

before, not many months preceding

her marriage to Mathys Grune

the painter, she was christened in the name of St. Anne.

In the compendious book about the historical

Grunewald which Dr. W. K. Zulch produced

in ancient Schwabach type,

in the year 1938 for Hitler’s birthday

the story of this extraordinary union

could not be admitted. Grunewald

would have noticed this child,

remarkable, it was said, for her beauty

when she passed through the Bridge Gate

and the Preachers’ Lane on her way

to her workplace just outside the ghetto.

But there is no evidence that it was he who induced

this Anna, betrothed to him a year later,

to change her religious faith.

Rather it seems that she herself

had facilitated this step

attesting great strength of will,

or desperation, by looking the painter

straight in the eyes; perhaps

at first merely in love with

his green-colored name,

a conjunction which to the bachelor

master, who meanwhile had given up

the Mainz Court Painter’s appointment

in favour of the great Isenheim Altar

commission, will not have come amiss,

for without a household of his own

he could employ no assistant

or apprentice for his work.

When Grunewald buys a house

very close to the cathedral

on December 17th 1512

for twenty-three guilders

twelve shillings, already,

the documents record, he has taken

to wife the baptised Anna.

The much admired young proselyte,

who for the Frankfurt Christian

community, which even for her baptism

had overwhelmed her with gifts,

was no mean acquisition, and

could have founded Grunewald’s fortune.

If it fell out otherwise, for one thing

it was because the painter

who later lived as a recluse

and almost underground, himself

made impossible his recognition

by this community; and,

for another, as his pictures prove,

he had more of an eye for men,

whose faces and entire physique

he executed with endless devotion

whereas his women for the most part

are veiled, so relieving him of the fear

of looking at them more closely.

Perhaps that is why Grunewald’s

Anna grew shrewish, ill, a victim

to perverse reason, to brain fevers

and to madness.

In the end, awaiting recovery,

she is placed in hospital where

at the time of the painter’s death

still she lives on, infirm

in body and mind.

In the Chicago Art Institute

hangs the self-portrait of an unknown