Winfried Sebald - After Nature

young painter which in 1929

passed into the Frankfurt art trade

from Sweden. The small maple panel

shows a scarcely twenty-year-old

at the window of a narrow room.

Behind him, on a shelf not quite

in perspective, pots of paint,

a crayon, a seashell and a precious Venetian

glass filled with a translucent essence.

In one hand the painter holds

a finely carved knife of bone

with which to trim the drawing-pen

before continuing work on a female nude

that lies in front of him next to an inkwell.

Through the window on his left a

landscape with mountain and valley

and the curved line of a path is visible.

This last, Zülch philosophises, is the way

into the world, and no one took it other

than the man, vanished without a trace,

to whom his research is devoted and whose art

he thinks he can recognise in the anonymous picture.

The reason for the signature “M.N.”

above the window-frame must be

that the painter Mathis Nithart,

discovered in archives but otherwise

not identified by any works of his own,

hid behind the name of Grünewald.

Hence the initials M.G. and N. on the Snow

Altar at Aschaffenburg, hence the merging,

most remarkable, given the difference in age,

of the young painter with the Sebastian

pierced with arrows at Isenheim.

And indeed the person of Mathis Nithart

in documents of the time so flows into

the person of Grünewald that one

seems to have been the life,

then the death, too, of the other.

An X-ray photograph of the Sebastian panel

reveals beneath the elegiac

portrait of the saint

that same face again, the half-

profile only turned a tiny bit further

in the definitive overpainting.

Here two painters in one body

whose hurt flesh belonged to both

to the end pursued the study

of their own nature. At first

Nithart fashioned his self-portrait

from a mirror image, and Grünewald

with great love, precision and patience

and an interest in the skin

and hair of his companion extending

to the blue shadow of the beard

then overpainted it.

The martyrdom depicted is

the representation, to be sensed

even in the rims of the wounds,

of a male friendship wavering

between horror and loyalty.

It is conceivable that Nithart

who was also a maker of water displays,

in later years furthered

the mistaking of his person for

the increasingly unsociable Isenheim master,

that perhaps he was the connecting link

between Grünewald and the world become

inaccessible to him in his misfortune.

Around 1527, about twelve

years after the work in Alsace,

Nithart moved from Frankfurt, where

for a time he must have continued to share

the life of Grünewald, to Halle

to build, for its celebrated salt springs,

watercourses and an array

of jet fountains driven

by a most complicated system of scoop

wheels and pipes like that on the Main

at Aschaffenburg, a masterpiece of

mechanical art much visited at the time.

It is said, however, that Nithart

never accomplished much in Halle and often

changed lodgings. In the summer of

’twenty-eight he fell into

deep dejection and then, it seems,

death very soon overtook him.

The Frankfurt magistrates, when the news

of Nithart’s passing had reached them,

ordered a register to be made

of the household effects in his

workshop. The long list embraces

an accumulation of the most diverse things:

spoons and pottage bowls, soup cauldrons,

drawing-belts for water, fifteen

white goatskins, silver talers,

and copper coins from Schwaz in the Tyrol,

books, proclamations, scripts and many

Lutheran printed tracts. All this

irradiated by the glory of a unique

store of paints: lead white and albus,

Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

mountain green, alchemy green, blue

vitreous pastes and minerals

from the Orient. Clothing, too,

beautiful, item a gold-yellow pair of hose,

tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

in purpled velvet with black stitching,

a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat

and much exquisite adornment besides.

The estate in truth is that of two men, but

whether Grünewald, an inventor of singular

hues, shared his departed friend’s liking

for such gaudy arrayment

we cannot presume to say.

At the point where the great military road

from Strasbourg to the Burgundian portal, in line with

the run of the Vosges to the south,

crosses the Lauterbach’s course

from the Gebweiler transverse valley,

lies the village of Isenheim.

Here the Canons Regular,

the legendary history of whose order

is traced back to the anchorite

Antonius the Hermit who

in the year 357 departed this life

in the Theban desert, in 1300

acquired the site from the Murbach

Cluniacs to found an Antonian hospital

for the cure of St. Anthony’s fire

which raged throughout all Europe,

an infection of the blood that led

to the rotting away of the limbs

and with leprosy was among

the most dreaded diseases of the Middle Ages.

When gradually St. Anthony’s fire

died, the Antonian hospitals adopted

other ailments that afflicted body or mind

for their healing, such as epilepsy

and the so-called venereal scourges

which spread disastrously after 1490.

The treatment of patients who at their arrival

were usually half-destroyed already

tended towards this, that, as

hieratic witnesses to evil,

at first they were led to the altar

in the choir aisle, baptised in the name

of a martyr to God and so, as it were

despite and together with their perversion,

brought into the precincts of salvation.

In this it happened not infrequently

that from the relic of St. Anthony

encased in the shrine of the altar

a miracle emanated, or that

those in some part horribly disfigured were

later rid of their affliction by the repeated

application of Saint Vinage, an elixir

which the canons obtained annually

on the day of the Resurrection in the monastery

of St. Antoine de Viennois,

near St. Marcellin on the Isère

by pouring wine on the bones,

there preserved, of St. Anthony.

This liquid, twice purified,

was distributed by the monastery’s messengers

up and down the country, and with it

the peasants blessed that pig which

in their sties wore the bell of the saint,

who was also the patron of flocks and their keepers.

As for the hospital itself, where

of the twelve canons eight

usually studied philosophy

under a lector,

the rituals of purification

according to which the sick were treated

became a battle fought over their bodies

against the presence of death manifested

in madness; became indeed the most

fundamental of all confrontations

in which the altar-work commissioned

from Grünewald by Guido Guersi,

the Isenheim Preceptor, was to engage

the painter in a great therapeutic

task through the representation,

executed in beauteous and harrowing

colours, of the hour of the pale

streams of pus. At the latest

with the commencement of his work

in the Alsatian Home of the Crippled

where the most diverse material for inspection

of the manners in which a human being

creeps into himself, herself or