The High Renaissance
 
&

Mannerism

 

Matthias Grunewald 

(b ?Wurzburg, c. 1475–80; d Halle, 30 or 31 Aug 1528).

German painter, draughtsman, hydraulic engineer and architect. He is generally regarded as the greatest painter of the German Renaissance and certainly its greatest colourist. His paintings are unparalleled in their extraordinary beauty and expressive force. He was a man of profound religious beliefs whose vision transcended the visible world and led him to paint some of the most moving and memorable images of Christ’s Passion in Western art. His pictorial language is rooted in the symbolic imagery of the Middle Ages, especially the mysticism of the 14th century, but is at the same time proto-Baroque in its dramatic movement, in the highly expressive language of drapery forms and gestures and in the strong contrasts of light and shadow. Unlike Durer, he did not make prints; the linear techniques of printmaking were foreign to this quintessentially painterly artist. Even his drawings are consistently rendered in the painterly medium of black chalk rather than pen and ink.

Second view of the Isenheim Altarpiece