Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Who would have called Christ a despicable low thief, a robber stalking dark forests? Angry, seditious talk. And yet this and other pungent images on Christ, Saint John, and the Virgin Mary are the stuff of one of the earliest modern studies on Grunewald, studies of 1886 by Émile Verhaeren. When Verhaeren first published his intensely personal response to Grünewald’s vivid image of Christ’s putrid body in 1886, Grünewald’s oeuvre was barely known and was all but an embarrassment to men like the great art historian Charles Blanc who readily omitted discussion of Grünewald’s various Crucifixions in his seminal École Allemande (1875). Verhaeren, on the other hand, gladly embraced Grünewald’s blistering images, blaspheming his way with sacrilegious metaphors to relive for himself and his readers the anguish Christ’s “green, pustulated body” stirred in him. Crushed by Christ’s pain, Verhaeren’s essay on Grünewald (one he would expand in 1894 into a much larger essay) ranks with Joris Karl Huysmans far better known discussion of the Karlsruhe panel (1891) as one of the most revealing studies of the German master of the late nineteenth century, an essay rich in appalling, grinding images that plumb anew the turgid and uplifting mysteries of les gothiques allemands. My talk with the Religion Society then intends to highlight Verhaeren’s little known essay, place it in perspective in Grünewald studies and demonstrate why coming upon the Karlsruhe panel was a revelation for Verhaeren.