Encounter with Grunewald‪.‬

Why I took my family to Colmar in 1958 to see the Isenheim altarpiece I no longer remember. I may have heard of it in conversations with old school friends who had read Karl Barth's discussion of the piece in his Dogmatics and thus imagined that a visit to Colmar was needed to establish theological sophistication. A few years later, I hitchhiked alone to Colmar, deciding that the first trip had been too cursory, something like a tour group's tearing through the Louvre. Thirty years after the first visit, I took my family to Colmar once more but achieved no further sophistication. I am not proud of the fact that my taste in the visual arts is Philistine and must confess that my preoccupation with the Isenheim retable, and especially with what is exposed when its wings are closed, is more of a reflex from a reading of the Bible and its interpreters. The thing hangs above my bed--like the scriptures more of a challenge or even a judgment than of something known or understood. Description