In our final class sessions on altarpieces we discussed the inner workings of the Portinari and Isenheim altarpieces. Both stunning works include huge amounts of iconography, some unique to their pieces but some being regularly occurring motifs from other altarpieces we have seen throughout the class. The Portinari altarpiece contains a number of very interesting pieces, from the narrative add in of a pregnant virgin Mary and Joseph fleeing to safety on a donkey outside of the city, to a prominent featuring of the patron’s entire family. Of which we used to date the age of the children and confirm exactly which family they hailed from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Isenheim altarpiece was equally as exquisite, if not more, with all of its minute details and narrative flowings. It was made for the Antonite monastery, a monsatery of St. Anthony Abbot. The interesting throughline of the altarpiece was its deep connection to St. Anthony and the healing of those with ergotism. As Christ is featured with much of the same skin conditioning that many of the patients at the monastery were expected to have. It drove home the point, especially with the deeper panels revealing the perfection of Christ’s skin after His resurrection, that those who were lying sick and dying could not only relate with their savior in a deeply personal way, but they could live having hope that their condition would only afflict them for but a moment compared to eternity in perfect health. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In our final class sessions on altarpieces we discussed the inner workings of the Portinari and Isenheim altarpieces. Both stunning works include huge amounts of iconography, some unique to their pieces but some being regularly occurring motifs from other altarpieces we have seen throughout the class. The Portinari altarpiece contains a number of very interesting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9871,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9871"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}