Country: Italy
Year: 2006
Duration: 30'
“You have just come in, when it appears abruptly astonishing you with the appalling nightmare of a Calvary. It is like the typhoon of an unbridled art which passes by carrying you away.” The altarpiece of Isenheim, today in the Museum of Unterlinden in Colmar, masterpiece of the great painter Mathias Grünewald, in this tale appears and disappears in movement like a loose intermittence of the eye which, blinded, blurs the sight and captures the prey. Fragments of a polyptych syllabizing a theory of grief, and of happiness falling. “The Isenheim Altar-piece by Mathias Grünewald (1512-1516), at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, is a Mystery of Beauty, where sorrow and joy, good and evil, sin and grace triumphs with an invasive force. The only possible vision for those who had a ‘hand-to-hand fighting experience’ with it is a start of lights and shades, of dark and bright blindness, an interior earthquake bringing to the detail and totality. You have to take your mind off things in order to be able to see it. ‘Neither the sun nor the death can be stared at,’ François de La Rochefoucauld.” (E. Sgarbi)