Most altarpieces show one fixed image. The Isenheim Altarpiece was built to show several, folding open in stages so that its visible scene could change with the liturgical calendar, and each state was designed as its own complete composition rather than a partial view of a hidden whole.
Closed, on ordinary days, it shows Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion: a gaunt, greenish, wounded Christ hangs on a rough-hewn cross between the grieving Virgin, a wailing Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist's pointing hand, with the artist's trademark unsparing attention to torn, discoloured flesh. Opened once, on feast days, it reveals a gentler sequence: the Annunciation, a Nativity attended by a concert of angels, and a radiant Resurrection in which Christ rises glowing through the very tomb lid Grunewald shows shattering beneath him.
Opened a second time, on Saint Anthony's own feast day, the painted wings swing aside to expose Nikolaus Hagenauer's carved wooden shrine: a seated Saint Anthony flanked by the standing figures of Saints Augustine and Jerome, rendered in gilded relief rather than paint. The two remaining painted panels, now on the outer edge of this final state, show Anthony assaulted by grotesque demons and, in the calmer companion scene, Anthony meeting the hermit Paul in the desert. No other altarpiece from the period changes its entire visible subject this many times, and the sequence was never meant to be seen all at once; it was meant to be lived with across a year.