The French president François Hollande officially opened the renovated Unterlinden Museum in the city of Colmar, in France’s northeastern Alsace region, on Saturday, 23 January. The museum is best known as the home of the massive Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16), made for a nearby hospice treating patients suffering from St Anthony’s fire. Painted by Matthias Grünewald, it features colourful and graphic depictions of the life of St Anthony and bodies tortured by the disease now known to be ergotism, a type of fungal poisoning.
The Unterlinden Museum has been partially reopened since December, after a three-year closure for an extensive, €44m renovation and expansion, with the city contributing €17m in funding. The project, which has doubled the exhibition space, includes a new Herzog & de Meuron-designed wing to house the Modern art collection. This also links the museum’s existing spaces in a 13th-century convent to a disused public bathhouse.
The convent—whose chapel houses the altarpiece—was also restored, to “re-establish volumes consistent with the history of the convent, beyond the transformations dating to the end of the 19th century”, the architect Richard Duplat, who led this restoration, told our sister paper Le Journal des Arts. Original painted wood ceilings were among the discoveries. The museum is due to be completely renovated and reopened this spring.
Another major undertaking is due to begin this autumn: an in situ restoration of the Isenheim Altarpiece—which was relocated during the renovation—starting with the central sculptural elements carved by Niclaus de Haguenau. This follows a very controversial, short-lived restoration in 2011, undertaken by the museum without the permission of the state, which officially owns the altarpiece. The work has survived the iconoclasm of the French revolution, a move to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek as German wartime booty in 1917 and transfers around France during the Second World War.