Matthias Grünewald

Matthias Grünewald worked in Germany around 1470 to 1528, painting religious subjects in a late medieval idiom long after the Renaissance had swept through Italy. Only ten paintings and thirty-five drawings survive; many others sank en route to Sweden as war booty. He remained obscure for centuries, his paintings misattributed to Albrecht Dürer until the late nineteenth century — an irony, given that Dürer's clarity and classicism stand at the opposite pole from Grünewald's expressionist intensity. His largest work, the Isenheim Altarpiece, was created between 1512 and 1516. It remains his mos…