Materielle Welten – Der virtuelle Salon am IMAREAL
Material Worlds – The Virtual Salon at IMAREAL

Mittwoch, 08. Oktober 2025 | 17:00 Uhr (MESZ)
Wednesday, 08 October 2025 | 5 p.m (CEST)

 

 

Grünewald Remediating Wood from the Panel

Gregory Bryda (Barnard College, Columbia University, New York)

This lecture examines how the well-known south German painter known as Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470–1528) exploited wood’s semantic ability to oscillate between subject and medium in order to interweave the medicinal properties of the bodies of Christ and saints with those of the vegetal bodies of trees and plants. Grünewald employed this form of meta-representation on altars, where his artworks staged the liturgical enlivenment of Christ’s body as well as medicinal herbs. In analyzing two of his major painted altarpieces, one for the Antonine canons at Isenheim and the other for Jakob Heller in Frankfurt’s Dominican Church, this talk demonstrates how the church, through the performance of the liturgy, which centered around but branched outward from the altar table, exerted itself as agent accounting for the healing properties of real-world plants and trees. Building an impasto relief off the wooden panel or applying such a thin layer of paint as to allow the panel to shine through, Grünewald cleverly simulated the performative essence of medieval plants with his paintbrush, blurring the distinctions between metaphor and practice and artifice and nature.

Vortragssprache/Language: English

Gregory Bryda is assistant professor of medieval art history at Barnard College (Columbia University, New York). His book The Trees of the Cross (Yale University Press, 2023), which was the finalist for a PROSE Award in Art History, explores the fraught relationship between the church and plants in late medieval Germany. His research into Germany’s long historiographic affinity with the forest formed part of a special issue of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte he co-edited in 2023 on “Art and Environment in the Third Reich,” whose contributors examined the period’s aestheticization of “race” and landscape across a broad range of disciplines and media. He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, Universität Hamburg, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he was a Fulbright Guest Professor.

The lecture will take place online via Teams. Please use the registration form below. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us via sekretariat.imareal@plus.ac.at.

Read more about the lecture series in this blog post (English version).