Colmar's Unterlinden Museum, 2010

Dwight Peck's personal website

Colmar street scenes in 2010

The time seemed right for an inexpensive late-medieval long weekend, and Colmar is just three hours up the train line.

The Musée d'Unterlinden

The museum's in a 13th century Dominican monastery and specializes in Rhenish (or Rhineland) paintings and medieval art of all kinds from the region. It takes more than one visit, so we're back this afternoon. (Here's the website.)

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

There's much more here, too: armor displays, recreated period rooms, objets d'art like ceramics etc., Benjamin Franklin inventions, and a prestigious collection of post-WWII abstract artists who don't interest me at all. But the pride of place goes to the Isenheim Altarpiece, which is worth a big room for display and a quiet hour by itself.

Many local and regional museums might make the same tireless efforts, but this one has also got a hometown boy, Martin Schongauer, and that's half the game right there.

Here's the monastic cloister, overseen by those curious chaps up on the roof.

Two of them look angelic or at least virtuous, but the middle guy looks like he knows the score.

In the monastic works, a 17th century wine press and original wine cellar. It's all about priorities.

In the museum itself, the welcoming committee

A good premonition of the artistic themes we'll be exploring this afternoon.

The Isenheim Altarpiece in the centre, with some great Schongauer works on the way up the aisle

Here we go -- avoiding stumbling over that dead knight's tomb-slab in the centre of the aisle. This is one of the most wonderful museum display settings you could imagine.

A Martin Schongauer tableau -- he was a late 15th century slightly-pre-Dürer engraver and painter from Colmar (d.1491) whose engravings were prized highly all over Europe, but whose surviving paintings are few, and most of them are here. [I'm sneaking these photos with my Lumix set on no-flash, so most didn't turn out well at all.]

Both medieval and very funny -- this I suppose is Christ releasing the virtuous pre-Christians out of purgatory, and the purgatorial demon doesn't seem to mind at all, judging by the smile on one of his faces.

Christ ascends to Heaven, to sit on the right hand side of Etc. Etc.
Zoop! "Where'd He go?!?!?!"

This is the famous altarpiece, or at least what you see when the double-wing panels are folded out in a certain way. Matthias Grünewald was not the artist's name, as it turns out. He seems to have been known as Matthias the Painter ("der Maler") but his surname may have been Gothart or Neithardt; we report, you choose (the Unterlinden website calls him Niclaus of Haguenau). He evidently knew the Renaissance trends in art and rejected them. The Altarpiece, completed in 1515, is his best-known work, but there's not much left otherwise. Most of his works were stolen by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War and sank with the ship in the Baltic. [By 2016, the museum is proudly proclaiming Matthia Grünewald as the artist.]

-- God will now take your questions.

A Stephen Fry look-alike doing his Jesus impressions. With an orb.

There's armor and what not in other parts of the museum. Armor for small people.

A recreated drawing room -- look at that strange thing in the middle.

Get ready. . . . It's a musical instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin (OUR Benjamin Franklin), of which a few hundred have survived. They're glass bowls that you slide back and forth whilst pumping the treadle to create different tones. The museum has a recording of it, and it is just beyond appalling.

We're ready for the passover parade to begin

-- Nobody's getting near MY Saint unless he's completely adorative.

-- Brother, can you spare a dime?

Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative,

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