[357] --not a visible triumph as such. 31) REMBRANDT^a, DESCENT FROM THE CROSS--Now here I only ask you to look at it, to compare it with this beautifying naturalism which we have seen, and the infinite superiority, religiously speaking, of such a picture. 32) GRÜNEWALD^b--I go a little bit back now to the picture which many people, including myself, consider to be the greatest picture ever painted in Germany. It was in the beginning of the Reformation period, beginning of the 16th century, earlier than Rembrandt. And you keep this picture of the Cross in your mind because I show you at the end a modern picture which is very similar. Now here, in the extreme ugliness of it, I also would ask, would your congregations, most of them, accept this picture

in the church? Or would you say this is blasphemy of the Son of God, this His body is really as it is described in Isaiah 53, full of green spots, expressions the decay of the body, and the swelling of the feet and of the other things. That is expressionism^c, if you want, but expressionism in terms of something which is at the same time concrete. It is again a transitory moment here, and therefore one of the greatest. He and Giotto^d and Rembrandt are the great transitories [sic.] in whom the spirit of what I called expressionism is united with understanding of the natural forms in a way which cannot

artificially be produced and certainly not imitated. 33) GRÜNEWALD, RESURRECTION--It is on the same [Isenheim] altarpiece--and I want to say this is almost the ONLY picture of resurrection^e which I personally can accept because it doesn't make the resurrection into a physical event of special events of a special body^f, but it puts the body