Matthias Grünewald

Toperfect Art supplies biography and painting knowledge, this is useful for painters and Jesus art fans.

Our art gallery not only supply high-quality crucified Christ oil painting reproduction for sale, but also sell altarpiece art classic.

The famous artists in our art company are good at German Renaissance paintings reproductions and other beautiful painting in expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art.

Matthias Grünewald Paintings

Matthias Grünewald Paintings for Sale >>

Oil Painting Supplies of 350 Famous Painters * Oil Painting Supplies of 150 Styles

Knowledge: Oil Painting * Acrylic Painting * Watercolor Painting * Gouache Painting * Asian Ink Art
Pastel Painting * Charcoal Drawing * Pencil Sketch * Wax Crayon Painting

Toperfect supply oil painting masterpiece reproductions of the old master Matthias Grünewald, You are welcome to send us your own pictures to copy as museum quality oil painting on canvas.

The copyright of scripts in this website is owned by Toperfect. Toperfect reserves the manual scripts of original version. Toperfect will take appropriate legal action in the piracy and infringements of copyright.

Matthias Grünewald Biography

His real name was Mathis Gothart, called Nithart or Neithardt, was a major figure in a generation of great northern German Renaissance artists that also included Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Altdorfer.
The artist remained relatively unknown until the 20th century; only about 13 of Matthias Grünewald paintings and some drawings survive, in subjects of altarpiece, crucified Christ, religious subjects, Jesus, German Renaissance, late medieval Central European art. His present worldwide reputation, however, is based chiefly on his greatest masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1513-15), which was long believed to have been painted by Dürer.

The earliest datable work is the Mocking of Christ (1503; Alte Pinakothek, Munich), a colorful, vehemently expressive oil painting demonstrating his ability to create dazzling light effects. The Matthias Grünewald painting depicts Christ blindfolded and being beaten by a band of grotesque men. The figures are thick-bodied, soft, and fleshy, done in a manner suggestive of the Italian High Renaissance. Elements of the painting also show his assimilation of Dürer, specifically his Apocalypse series. Different from High Renaissance idealism and humanism, however, are his uses of figural distortion to portray violence and tragedy, thin fluttering drapery, highly contrasting areas of light and shadow (CHIAROSCURO), and unusually stark and iridescent color. It is these elements, already in evidence in this early Matthias Grünewald painting, that he was to develop into the masterful, individualistic style most fully realized in his Isenheim Altarpiece.

The final flowering of the Gothic came relatively late, in the painting of the German artist, Matthias Grünewald (his real name was Mathis Neithart, otherwise Gothart, 1470/80-1528). He was possibly an exact contemporary of Dürer, but while Dürer was deeply influenced by the Renaissance, Matthias Grünewald artist ignored it in his choice of subject matter and style. Much of Matthias Grünewald painting has not survived to this day, but even from the small amount that has come down to us, it is possible to see him as one of the most powerful of all painters. No other painter has ever so terribly and truthfully exposed the horror of suffering, and yet kept before us, as Bosch does not, the conviction of salvation. His Crucifixion, part of the many-panelled Isenheim Altarpiece, is now kept in Colmar. It was commissioned for the Antoinite monastery at Isenheim and was intended to give support to patients in the monastic hospital. Christ appears hideous, his skin swollen and torn as a result of the flagellation and torture that Matthias Grünewald artist endured. This was understandably a powerful image in a hospital that specialized in caring for those suffering from skin complaints.

The more accessible Small Crucifixion engages us very directly with the actual death of the Savior. The crucified Lord leans down into our space, crushing us, leaving us no escape, filling the Matthias Grünewald painting with his agony. We are hemmed in by the immensities of darkness and mountain, alone with pain, forced to face the truth. The Old Testament often talks of a ``suffering servant'', describing him in Psalm 22 as ``a worm and no man'': it is of his Christ that we think. In this noble veracity, Gothic art reached an electrifying greatness.