Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello
Nietzsche · en
And the cadaverous flesh tones! Such is his fidelity, a fidelity
almost pathologic, that two such eminent men as Charcot and Richet
testified, after study, to the too painful verity of this early
German's brushwork. He depicted with shocking realism the malady known
as St. Anthony's Fire, and a still more pathological interpretation
by Huysmans follows. But he warmly praises the fainting mother,
one of the noble figures in German art. We allude now to the Colmar
Crucifixion, with its curious introduction of St. John the Baptist in
Golgotha, and the dark landscape through which runs a gloomy river.
Fainting Mary, the mother of Christ, is upheld by the disciple John.
There is a mysterious figure of a girl, an ugly but sorrowful face, and
the lamb bearing the cross is at the foot of the cross. Audacious is
the entire composition. It wounds the soul, and that is what Grünewald
wished. His harsh nature saw in the crucifixion not a pious symbol but
the death of a god, an unjust death. So he fulminates upon his canvas
his hatred of the outrage. How tender he can be we see in this Virgin.
On the back of this polyptique are a Resurrection and Annunciation.
The latter is bad. The former is a dynamic picture representing Christ
in a vast aureole arising to the sky, His guards tumbled over at the
side of the tomb. There is an explosion of luminosity. Christ's face
is radiant; He displays his palms upward, pierced by the nails. The
floating aerial effect and the draperies are wonderfully handled. The
museum wherein hang these works was formerly a convent of nuns, founded
in 1232, and in 1849 turned into a museum. Huysmans rages, of course,
over the change.
He finds among the Grünewalds at Colmar--there are nine in all--a St.
Anthony bearded, that reminds him of a Father Hecker born in Holland.
What a simile, made by a man who probably never saw the American
priest, except pictured!