Trustee behavior
A couple of gossip columns had the word not too long ago that Steve Wynn of Las Vegas Mirage Resorts, Bellagio hotel and art collection fame had been blackballed by Metropolitan Museum trustee and New York social doyenne Jayne Wrightsman from buying a super-expensive apartment in her 820 Fifth Avenue building. Might not have been the best thing for a Met trustee to do.

As enterprising Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Costello, now on the Art and Money beat, revealed, Wynn "might keep his famed art collection after all." He has cut a deal, which, if it holds, enables him to keep much of the $400 million art collection now on display in the Bellagio Hotel and buy whatever is left for under-market prices. The collection which Wynn assembled to rent to Mirage Resorts for a hefty fee and for a sizable Nevada tax deduction has some superior works, one of which is a lean and crisp Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Woman against a Background of Wheat, which looks like a late 19th-century Botticelli. Another Wynn work is one of Renoir's rare triumphs, The Loge. The collection, funnily enough, happens to fit into the Met's awesome Impressionist and Post-Imps like a hand to a glove.

Plus, Wynn sold his empire to MGM for $4.4 billion and the pick-up of some $2 billion in debt and thus may be rich. The last I heard the Met was supposed to be interested in very rich people with fab art collections. And trustees were supposed to work tirelessly to yank money and art into the establishment. Maybe that's changed.

Great shows to see and wonders to behold
At London's National Gallery until May 13th is a small show of 15 paintings by Matthias Grünewald and his contemporaries like Hans Baldung Grien and Lucas Cranach, mostly from the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland. The gem of the stunning group is a dynamic and terrifyingly beautiful early 16th-century crucifixion by Grunewald. As Rachel Campbell-Johnston puts it so nicely in the London Times:

No one actually knows who Matthias Grnewald was. It is unlikely that that is even his name. He may have been referred to contemporaneously as "the German Correggio" but he is as great a mystery to us as Shakespeare -- probably, explains the art historian Gombrich, because Grnewald considered himself simply a craftsman working within the traditions of religious art of the time.

But what art. What religion. Grnewald's Isenheim altarpiece is perhaps more brutal, more intense, than any other single artwork. "It is as if a typhoon of art has been released," wrote Huysmans of the harrowing meditation on physical suffering and divine sacrifice that form the central crucifixion panel. Christ stretches suppurating and dead: a "morgue redeemer", a "sewer deity." It obsessed Beckmann, Picasso, Rilke and Mann.

What few know is that Grünewald painted the altar for the chapel of a 15th-century hospital for incurable syphilis and Christ was shown ravaged by the disease and on his resurrection cleansed of it.

As Campbell-Johnson goes on:

The much smaller Grnewald painting which the National Gallery now shows is one of a few which resemble the Isenheim altarpiece (which now hangs in Colmar). The crucified Christ, spotlighted against a pitch black sky, is finally dead. His body, battered and emptied of its spirit, hangs above the group of mourners, above his mother robed in black, above the hunched and weeping Marys (Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James) and a miserable St John the Evangelist, whose blood red robes make vivid contrast with the green of fields beyond.

But it is the body of Christ, spectrally pallid, supernaturally enlarged, that provides the focus. Bruised, scourged and studded with thorns, nailed, and pierced with a spear, it provides a terrible inventory of the Passion's suffering. This painting has nothing to do with the ordered beauty of the Renaissance, or even with the thoroughgoing naturalism of The Netherlands. It is medieval in its manic fervor. It does not ask to be judged by aesthetic standards; it is meant to be looked at with religious devotion. Every detail is there to be meditated upon, so that Christ's sacrifice might be more deeply felt and understood.

The divine Piero revealed
On April 7th one of the wonders of the Renaissance world will be on view again after too long a restoration -- Piero della Francesca's scintillating fresco cycle, "The Legend of the True Cross" in Arezzo's church of San Francesco.

Here's Frederika Randall to talk about it -- from her recent article in the European Wall Street Journal: "As the Wraps Come Off, Piero's 'True Cross' Fresco Looks Good as New."

It makes me want to take the first plane to Italy.