Matthias Grünewald’s Gruesome Good Friday
Nits and fleas bedeviled the viscous skin of the 14th-century German Dominican mystic Henry Suso, who, slick with puss and piss, filth and shit, hadn’t bathed for a quarter century. In his sleep, he wore a leather glove covered in sharp, iron tacks, so that when he inevitably scratched himself, any relief from the incessant itching would at least be attended by the ripping and bloodying of his flesh.
“There is just now in my soul a bitter complaint that Thy Passion does not at all times thoroughly penetrate my heart,” Suso wrote in a prayer to Christ, “and that I do not meditate on it so affectionately as in reason I ought to do.” In response to this failing, Suso practiced a form of corporal mortification that was extreme by even the standards of Medieval clergy. In addition to his rejection of hygiene, the monk also carved Christ’s abbreviated Latin name, “IHS,” into his chest. He would only drink water once his tongue had become engorged and cracked, and he slept on a cross studded in nails, the better to focus his mind on the agony that the Son of God experienced before his death. Jesus, however, was only on the cross for three hours, whereas Suso elected to remain there for nearly three decades. Grotesque, primitive, superstitious, horrific, the seeming relic of a barbarous time — and yet Suso’s example has something to tell us about finitude and life, about suffering and death. Such sentiments were mainstays of macabre German Christianity in the late Middle Ages where Suso’s example isn’t rare, only extreme.
In those mystic tendrils, where gothic faith was thick as fog and dark as midnight in the Black Forest on Walpurgisnacht, Suso’s doxology of the suffering body could be seen in a momentous work painted a century and a half after the mystic’s death. Matthias Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece” (c. 1509–15) is, as Peter Fingesten wrote in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1984), the “most tragic, lacerated, and distorted crucifixion ever painted.” Made for the Monastery of St. Anthony in Alsace, variously in Germany or France, depending on the time period, Grünewald’s altarpiece was composed over a period of approximately four years and likely completed in 1516, the year before that other death-obsessed German, Martin Luther, would inaugurate the Reformation.
