June 6-7 Colmar, Alsace

Time for the big city.
We took a small, perfectly adequate room in Hotel Turenne, just outside the old town near a canal, and went to check out the Michelin-recommended restaurants. Alas, most of them are closed Sunday evenings. In addition, the weather was changeable, to wit, it rained some of the time. But we walked around the canal, then sat in cafe La Krutenau by the canal, sipping Alsatian cremant (non-Champagne champagne), beer, wine.








Desiring more than the "tartes flambees" (thin-crust pizza) that the cafe served, we found one open restaurant, La Taverne. Continuing on the theme of ordering those menu items that were typically Alsatian, I ordered the tourte, and Jimmy, bratkartoffelen. His turned out to be fried potato cubes with sour cream and two hunks of munster - one might say, quality junk food - and mine, a large wedge of a savory pie containing pretty much just a surfeit of (very good) sausage meat, and a plate of more-than-welcome crudité. The place was pleasant and cozy, but we decided to have dessert elsewhere - only to find every place closed or closing.

The next morning, after picking up some bread, pastry, and cafe au lait, we did the Michelin walks around old Colmar. Once again, it was Alsatian-picturebook-lovely or cute, depending - but also, a city conducting business. (As we did in Nancy and in Riquewihr, we wondered how it was that the buildings were in such good shape, how much had they been restored, and when, and with what funds.) The buildings were decorated profusely with oriels with sandstone carvings, old paintings of Old Testament scenes, carved wood statues and ornaments.















The elaborate building below was built in the early 1600s for a merchant who became mayor. It later became the Wine Exchange building, and is topped by a statue of a barrelmaker (Fassbinder in German) by Bartholdi.

























The sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi was born in Colmar (so that's why there was a weird fake Statue of Liberty driving in from the outskirts!), and there is a Bartholdi museum in the old part of town.






There are several large churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic (the nature of this part of France).
























The streets in the old town were dominated by pedestrians, with a few canals as divisions.












One of the big draws to Colmar, and one for me, was the chance to see the Isenheim Altarpiece. I didn't remember anything about it - its appearance, its significance, even its dates; I just remembered that it was important and figured prominently in Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition and resided permanently at the Unterlinden Museum, which is housed in an old Dominican cloister. Under hypnosis I might have remembered that the artist, from the early 16th century and generally known as Matthias Grunewald, was the Mathis of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler.

The altarpiece exhibit contains a large number of works like it, or preceding it, or having similar themes - an enormous amount of information, explained by a very good audio guide. (I leave it to you to read the Hebrew in the work pictured here.)












The huge altarpiece at the end of this exhibit is exhibited in a large room in parts, so that one can see all of it (otherwise, its doors would be folded and the art, only visible in sections). It is much larger, and much more expressive, than I expected. We didn't get good photos of it, but it is easy to find excellent ones all over the web.

I spent most of my time in the altarpiece exhibit, while Jimmy also saw an exhibit of paintings showing life in Colmar.

The topic of St Anthony's Fire kept coming up - apparently, it was a scourge of the area, and St Anthony the one who was supposed to cure it. St Anthony's Fire is an affliction caused by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye, causing a wide range of symptoms (ergot is also the raw material from which LSD was first synthesized).