Christianity, Culture, Vocation
March 21st, 2008 | Art, Christ, Holidays
Grunewald’s “Crucifixion”
(Note how the same artist of this utterly dead Jesus renders Him at Easter, below. You may want to save that view, as well as the other posts on the Resurrection, for Easter day.)
Gene Edward Veith is the Provost and Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College, the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, a columnist for World Magazine and TableTalk, and the author of 18 books on different facets of Christianity & Culture.
Lucas Cranach was the great artist of the Reformation. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. He was a businessman, who first printed Luther's translation of the Bible; a politician, who served on the Wittenberg town council and served the city as its mayor; a chemist, who operated a pharmacy; a teacher, who trained a host of apprentice artists; a family-man, who helped arrange Luther's marriage with the two men serving as the godfathers of each other's children; and an active layman in his church, who gave his pastors important personal and material support.
As a Christian who lived out his faith in his many different callings, Cranach thus embodies the Reformation doctrine of vocation, using the gifts God had given him in service to Christ and his neighbor in the church, the family, the workplace, and the culture.
In the spirit of Lucas Cranach, this blog will discuss wide-ranging issues of Christianity and culture with a Lutheran twist.
Books by Gene Edward Veith at cph.org! |
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3 comments ↓
[…] (HT: Gene Veith) […]
Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece is probably my all time favorite painting of our Lord’s death. The gnarled hands and twisted legs and ribs as well as Mary being deathly pale. Incredible piece.
I understand that the Isenheim monastery (in which this piece was located) housed a hospital for those suffering from skin and blood diseases as well as epilepsy. The French Catholic novelist J.K. Huysmans remarked:
“That awful Christ who hung dying over the altar of the Isenheim hospital would seem to have been made in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him; they must surely have found consolation in the thought that this God they invoked had suffered the same torments as themselves, and had become flesh in a form as repulsive as their own; and they must have felt less forsaken, less contemptible. It is easy to see why Grünewald’s name, unlike the names of Holbein, Cranach and Dürer, is not to be found in the account-books or the records of commissions left by emperors and princes. His pestiferous Christ would have offended the taste of the courts; he could only be understood by the sick, the unhappy and the monks, by the suffering members of Christ.”
http://urltea.com/30bg
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