...I...
Whoever closes the wings
of the altar in the Lindenhardt
parish church and locks up
the carved figures in their casing
on the lefthand panel
will be met by St. George.
Foremost at the picture's edge he stands
above the world by a hand's breadth
and is about to step over the frame's
threshold. Georgius Miles,
man with the iron torso, rounded chest
of ore, red-golden hair and silver
feminine features. The face of the unknown
Grünewald emerges again and again
in his work as a witness
to the snow miracle, a hermit
in the desert, a commiserator
in the Munich Mocking of Christ.
Last of all, in the afternoon light
in the Erlangen library, it shines forth
from a self-portrait, sketched out
in heightened white crayon, later destroyed
by an alien hand's pen and wash,
as that of a painter aged forty
to fifty. Always the same
gentleness, the same burden of grief,
the same irregularity of the eyes, veiled
and sliding sideways down into loneliness.
Grünewald's face reappears, too,
in a Basel painting by Holbein
the Younger of a crowned female saint.
These were strangely disguised
instances of resemblance, wrote Fraenger
whose books were burned by the fascists.
Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art
men had revered each other like brothers, and
often made monuments in each other's
image where their paths had crossed.
Hence too, at the centre of
the Lindenhardt altar's right wing,
that troubled gaze upon the youth
on the other side of the older man
whom, years ago now, on a grey
January morning I myself once
encountered in the railway station
in Bamberg. It is St. Dionysius,
his cut-off head under one arm.
To him, his chosen guardian
who in the midst of life carries
his death with him, Grünewald gives
the appearance of Riemenschneider, whom
twenty years later the Würzburg bishop
condemned to the breaking of his hands
in the torture cell. Long before that time
pain had entered into the pictures.
That is the command, knows the painter
who on the altar aligns himself
with the scant company of the
fourteen auxiliary saints. Each of these,
the blessed Blasius, Achaz and Eustace;
Panthaleon, Aegidius, Cyriax, Christopher and
Erasmus and the truly beautiful
St. Vitus with the cockerel,
each look in different
directions without knowing
why. The three female saints
Barbara, Catherine and Margaret on
the other hand hide at the edge
of the left panel behind the back of
St. George putting together their
uniform oriental heads for
a conspiracy against the men.
The misfortune of saints
is their sex, is the terrible
separation of the sexes which Grünewald
suffered in his own person. The exorcised
devil that Cyriax, not only because
of the narrow confines, holds raised
high as an emblem in
the air is a female being
and, as a grisaille of Grünewald's
in the Frankfurt Städel shows in
the most drastic of fashions, derives from
Diocletian's epileptic daughter,
the misshapen princess Artemia whom
Cyriax, as beside him she kneels on
the ground, holds tightly leashed
with a maniple of his vestments
like a dog. Spreading out
above them is the branch work
of a fig tree with fruit, one of which
is entirely hollowed out by insects.
Copyright © 2002 by W. G. Sebald. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
