In the Mainz cathedral
there had been three altar panels,
with facing fronts and reverse
sides painted, one of them
showing a blind hermit who, as he crosses
the frozen Rhine river with a boy
to guide him, is assaulted by two murderers
and beaten to death. Anno 1631 or ’32,
in the wild war of that era this panel
had been taken away and sent off to Sweden,
but by shipwreck beside many other
such pieces of art had perished
in the depths of the sea.
Description of a lost work by Matthaeus Grünewald by W.G. Sebald.
W.G. Sebald, After Nature [1988], trans. Michael Hamburger [2002] (London: Penguin, 2003), 10. Original emphasis.