Painted by Matthias Grünewald for the Antonite monks of Isenheim, who nursed sufferers of ergotism and other skin diseases, the closed altarpiece shows Christ's body grey-green, torn by thorns and covered in sores. Patients could see their own afflictions in his. Hinged wings open onto an Annunciation, a Nativity and a Resurrection, and then onto Nikolaus Hagenauer's carved shrine.
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Christ's fingers splay and twist in agony against the black sky. At right, John the Baptist, long dead by then, points at him with an impossibly long finger.
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