by W. E. Gutman
Those who describe Bosch’s metaphorical universe as little more than a hodgepodge of devils and monsters simply don’t appreciate his creative independence, scathing irony and keen understanding of the social, religious and psychological dimensions of his time and place. The same parochial attitude would later greet the work of modern Surrealists, among them Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and Marcel Duchamps. Bosch does not attempt to stage a utopia. His is a vision of a world not given to meditation and self-inquiry, but consumed with paralyzing dread, most of it the legacy of religious fanaticism, and incessant brainwashing. As such, Bosch’s paintings must be seen as docudramas on evil, as “reality shows” so painful in their evocation that it is likely he was not only a witness but a casualty of the horrors he so cunningly recreated.
Alchemy, anticlericalism, human bestiality, death, the cosmos and the apocalypse are the key devices through which Bosch expresses his pessimism about man. Defined as the science beyond the realm of human comprehension, alchemy may have helped him hint at, without leaving incriminating clues, certain aspects of his life, possibly his sexual preferences. Androgyny, the state of being distinguishably neither male nor female, is a recurring theme in his work, with sub-themes -- hollow trees, broken empty eggshells, lots of buttocks and bizarre but unambiguous scenes of sodomy -- create an uncommon link between art and auto-psychoanalysis. His Garden of Earthly Delights must be seen as a sexual reverie, a melancholy rumination on the transience of carnal pleasure and the brevity of life.
Bosch’s anticlerical zeal often borders on blasphemy. His most celebrated paintings, The Haywain, The Ship of Fools, The Conjurer, are rife with caustic denunciations of clerical sleaze -- lasciviousness, malice, cruelty and simony (the buying and selling of church offices). The repressive power of the Church is aggressively flagged in his blazing scenes of Hell. Though it offers no clear evidence of atheism, his work is indisputably anti-religious.
One of Bosch’s sources is the Apocalypse, written by St. John at Patmos and composed of seven visions which suggest that the doomsday literature of the second and first centuries BCE contained essential elements of Judeo-Christian esoterica. Apocalyptic dreams and syncretism (the fusion of different forms of belief and practice) play a significant role in Bosch’s tormented cryptographic universe. Obsessed with the prophecies of the End of Days or of the Millennium which, after the fall of the Antichrist, must precede the Last Judgment, Bosch anticipates a Second Coming, not of religious fervor but of intellectual freedom and enlightenment.
A feature of cryptographic art is the use of “moralizing” glances at a Hell we can now deem absurd but which Bosch’s contemporaries viewed as real and inescapable. But in attacking the sadism of demons and otherworldly monstrosities, Bosch explicitly condemns oppression, the ghoulish cruelty of man, the ferocity and lust of the clergy and, with caustic wit, even the blatant consequences of anti-Semitism, then already in full swing. Every thief, every blasphemer, every heretic, every evil-doer must be a Jew. Bosch deciphers in the behavior of his contemporaries the absurd authority, the pessimism, the anguish, and the hopelessness that poison their lives.
Magnificent inventor of a cosmos in which the improbable and the inevitable coexist in perilous proximity, Bosch urges us, with cynicism and compassion, refinement and candor, to meditate on the follies of the world. His Appendices, which follow, add uncanny realism and immediacy to a world not so very different from our own. Jan Henryk van den Haag (JHVH) ...
I
“Know Thyself” is an ancient aphorism that encapsulates an indefinable ideal: Understanding human thought and behavior. To understand one’s self is to come to terms with others as well, sometimes with less sympathy and forbearance, sometimes with more. Man, however, can never fully comprehend the human spirit because it is quite impossible for him to know himself. The mind can ponder all but its own workings The old Chinese dictum may refer to a less ambitious ideal -- acknowledging one’s own habits, temperament, vices, summoning the ability to control them and other aspects of behavior that we struggle with in our daily lives.
In a narrower sense, “Know Thyself” may attempt to point to a question that everyone has asked: What is the meaning of life? To know one’s self involves a deeply personal transformation aimed at analyzing one’s own perception of reality.
We all defy mortality according to our nature. Some toil without respite to serve others, on battlefields and fields of grain and palace kitchens and slave ships. Others indulge in mind-numbing diversions. Others yet labor to make a statement, to leave a record of their brief passage on Earth. What we articulate through the printed word, in music, carved out of stone, set on canvas, speaks volumes about our inner-selves. Inevitably, such endeavors also reflect an image of the vast universe our eyes, minds and souls are called upon to observe, grasp and interpret.
The world my eyes have seen is the same world of courage and cowardice, generosity and greed, tolerance and fanaticism, honesty and hypocrisy, cruelty and compassion, birth, death, rebirth and the resurrection of ideas pondered by those who came before me but so rendered as to mirror the forms and realities of my time. I have invented nothing that does not already exist in outward appearance or in the nightmares that visit us when scruples, doubts and forebodings haunt our nights.
I, Jeroen Van Aken, better known as Hieronymus Bosch, offer no apology for my optic. What remains unsaid in my modest output, or what onlookers fail to deduce from it, is clarified in the records that follow, each dedicated to a work which I affirm to be entirely my own, executed in my workshop from preparatory sketch to final brushstroke. I have endeavored in each and every case, sometimes with discretion, often with transparent abandon, to protest the scourges that putrefy not only the flesh but the soul of men: the tyranny of inflexible beliefs, irrationality, self-righteousness, deceit and the abominations perpetrated on the simpleminded, the meek and the voiceless by the powerful, whether they be attired in ermine or purple vestments embroidered with gold.
What I call The Cure of Folly -- others may choose to call it something else -- is about madness, not the kind brought on by an excess or deficiency in any of the four humors -- black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood -- or by bad air, but by the idiocy that affects half-wits who can be tricked to swallow the preposterous ideas of charlatans who peddle instant wisdom and absolution, spiritual salvation and life beyond the grave. Who but those dedicated to our enslavement would have us believe in Original Sin, in Heaven and Hell, in the divine rights of kings, in the infallibility of the Church, and in the immortality of an unreadable soul that ceases to be the instant of our demise? The only remedy against such folly is reason, a faculty with which we are all born and which we must at all times guard against the despotism of tyrants, whether crowned or ordained, and against the oppression of absolute ideas. H. B.
Notes
The Cure of Folly is quintessential Bosch. See the “surgeon” who removes the “stone of folly” from a vacant-eyed patient as a nun, a book of medicine balanced on her head, and a pensive witness seem to be meditating on the limits of human stupidity. Worn by the quack, the funnel, a ridiculous headgear symbolizing vacuity and madness; the flower-like “tumor” pulled out of the patient’s skull; the dagger piercing his moneybag; the gallows rising in the distance -- all are part of the allusive language Bosch uses to ridicule senseless beliefs and degenerate customs, to mock mass credulity and the vanity of healers who are little more than charlatans armed with lancets and magic potions, leeches, emetics and often deadly purgatives.
Medical knowledge in Bosch’s time seems to have stood still. It was steeped in superstition and the Roman Catholic Church dictated the evolution and direction of the healing arts. Any perspective that differed from established Church dogma was viewed as heresy and severely punished. When the Church insisted that illness was the result of trespasses against God, few were in a position to argue. People at the time of the Black Death were convinced they had sinned. Others b
lamed the Jews for the spread of the plague. Thousands paid with their lives for this calumny.
While physicians believed that “humors” or a surfeit of blood in the body was a major cause of disease, their diagnoses were often influenced by astrology. Medical charts cautioned “surgeons” against certain procedures based on the patient’s sign. For example, a person born under the sign Aries could not undergo incisions to the head. One can reasonably assume that the cretin submitting to the “excision of madness” is not an Aries. On permanent display at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Bosch’s celebrated spoof makes one last overarching statement: everyone is insane who surrenders to convention, diktat and ritual. Only knowledge, tolerance and charity can help free humanity from the bondage of ignorance, fanaticism and insensitivity. M. M...
II
Ingenuity, nimbleness and tempo turn the most implausible sleight of hand into a convincing reality. The same attributes, in the hands of soul robbers and dream merchants, help spread anxiety, fear and guilt-ridden convictions among otherwise lucid individuals. It is this transformation, cunning, swift and irrevocable, that my painting, The Conjurer, attempts to represent.
The idea was quite simple. Take a magician, a simpleton gaping uncomprehendingly at the trickery unfolding before him as his purse is being snatched by a thief whose eyes are turned heavenward, and a group of onlookers gloating at the dupe’s astonishment. Overshadowed by the adults towering over him, a young boy finds amusement in the larceny. Surging from behind, seemingly out of place, visibly troubled by the proceedings, an interloper stares with dismay at the vulgar deception. I am that intruder; I painted myself into the scene, the better to expose the charlatan who toys with the gullible fools. H. B.
Notes
Nothing was known about the origins or gist of this painting, now hanging at the Municipal Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, until the appearance and translation of Bosch’s appendices. A meditation on the immorality of proselytism, using an archaic language that resonates with modern vigor, The Conjurer or The Swindler, as I prefer to call it, alludes with biting irony to the con-artistry of a Church seeking to snare the lost and the gullible into its ever-tightening net. It is yet another chapter in the annals of human stupidity, aptly illustrating the proverb, “he who is seduced by artifice loses his money, and even children laugh at him.” M. M...
III
What I try to warn against in The Haywain, a grand spectacle of a world gone mad, are the deranged mystical premonitions of my time and the horrors they engender. The world is a haystack: everyone plucks from it what he can get. The result is a free-for-all of ambition, envy, greed, hedonism, predation and cruelty. I have no cause to believe that man, little better than beast, will ever change. H. B.
Notes
The “free-for-all” is so out of control that it leads many to slip and die under the wheels of the cart while an obese monk, drink in hand, observes the butchery with saintly detachment as nuns hurriedly stuff clumps of hay into hempen sacs.
The Haywain, on view at the Museo del Prado in Madrid (with a copy at the San Lorenzo Monastery in Escurial) is a graphic satire on the fleeting nature of life, egoism and cupidity. It also warns against the evil of deceitful characters, whether monarch or spiritual guide. It is when the outer panels of the triptych are closed, revealing The Vagabond or Wanderer, that Bosch’s message about decadence most subtly typifies the mentality of the 15th century, a time when metaphysics began to express a pronounced antipathy toward the Church.
The landscape adds to the feeling of impermanence; the narrowness of the path; the rounded hills, the mottled green and yellow terrain. Is this drifter a mad pilgrim, the twenty-second major arcane of the Tarot? Or, as his bare knee suggests, is he an initiate into the occult sciences who witnesses and takes part in life’s vicissitudes? It is impossible to tell what his vacant eyes see or where his steps take him as he ventures across a small, unsteady bridge. A dog growls at him. Black birds hover over human bones. Behind him, scenes of brutality and absurdity unfold -- on the left, a murder, on the right a man and a woman dance to the sounds of a bagpipe, a symbol of lechery. Further up, gallows rise on the hill and a gleeful throng gathers to watch a hanging.
The weariness branded on this lost vagrant’s features is heightened by a sadness born of regret and irresolution. His is the lot of man torn between the lure of self-emancipation and worry-free conformity. M. M...
IV
Commissioned by the Brotherhood of Free Thought, and far from being a sermon against eroticism as some of my peers have suggested, The Garden of Earthly Delights is the daydream, the open-eyed reverie of humankind as it anxiously, sometimes frantically, attempts to free itself from the oppressive dictates of its worldly lords and spiritual masters. The uninhibited ecstasy I impart in some of my subjects is offset by the reticence, the look of doubt, stupefaction and disenchantment of those around them. Pleasure is fleeting, but only through it can man experience a rebirth of the innocence he enjoyed before his soul was usurped by the merchants of myth and false hope. Regardless of what posterity chooses to say about this work, let it be regarded and remembered as nothing more or less than a satirical comment on the preposterous claim that mankind is tainted by “Original Sin,” or that codified rules of behavior and synthetic beliefs can help expunge it. H. B.
Notes
There is little doubt that Bosch was a member of a “heretical” sect known as the Adamites, or Brotherhood of Free Thought, a radical group active in western Germany and the Netherlands which strove for a form of spirituality immune from sin, a concept they considered a fabrication and a stratagem for subjugation. Nor is there any doubt that The Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch’s most captivating and hermetic work, was commissioned for non-devotional purposes. His characters seem to be cavorting in a setting of exquisite yet alien exoticism, in harmony with unearthly beasts and unfamiliar flora and stirred by a sexuality that takes them to heretofore unknown heights of anticipation and bliss. While artists in Bosch’s time painted not for their own pleasure but to meet the crass demands of survival, it can now be argued that an all-consuming wave of anti-clericalism, fed by daily manifestations of papal and priestly misbehavior, and bolstered by a quest for self-knowledge, nurtured Bosch’s petulance. A handful of Bosch scholars, for reasons unknown, reject this thesis, now confirmed in the artist’s own hand, and conjecture about his art more feverishly than about any other artist. They keep struggling with his fantastical images, choosing to regard them as enigmatic representations of esoteric knowledge lost to history rather than clever metaphors. Yes, Bosch uses every symbolic device available to him. While he lived at a time when the beliefs of the Medieval Church held absolute moral authority, he robustly and steadfastly spoke against them.
There is a strong possibility that certain elements of this painting may have been inspired by the most significant and mind-altering event of his day -- Bosch was forty-two years old at the time -- the “discovery” of America. The left and center panels are drenched in tropical and oceanic atmosphere, evocative of Columbus who, approaching terra firma, thought that the place he had found at the mouth of the Orinoco River was the site of the Earthly Paradise. (Columbus would wax poetic about every new island, beachhead and verdant valley he set his eyes upon). The year when this triptych was created, circa 1492-93, was a time of adventure and discovery, when tales and trophies from the New World sparked the imagination of poets, painters and writers. Although the painting exudes many unearthly and implausible creatures, Bosch’s images and cultural references appealed to an elite humanist and aristocratic audience. The conquest of Africa and the East provided both wonder and terror to European intellectuals, as it led to the conclusion that Eden could never have been an actual geographic locale. The travel literature of the fifteenth century is referenced in the imprecise or exaggerated animal forms given life in The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The charting and occupation of this new world confirmed the exist
ence of regions previously only idealized in the mind's eye of artists and poets. At the same time, the existence of a Biblical paradise, marketed along with a Purgatory and Hell by the Church, began to be questioned by thinkers and relegated to the realms of mythology. In response, treatment of Paradise in literature, poetry and art shifted toward a self-consciously fictional Utopian imagery that would be further exploited by the religious merchants of false hope.
Art historian Erwin Panofsky admits that,
“In spite of all the ingenious, erudite and in part extremely useful research devoted to the task of ‘decoding’ Hieronymus Bosch, I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed. We have bored a few holes through the door of the locked room; but somehow we do not seem to have discovered the key.”
The “key” to Bosch’s universe is in full view and accessible to anyone capable of discarding embedded beliefs and willing to step beyond the allegories into a wasteland where only the truth blooms. M. M...
V
If I conclude this unavoidably superficial account with The Prodigal Son, I do so not because it is my last major work but because it summarizes my outlook on life and on the choices it forces us to make. Embodied in the hesitant posture and bewildered expression of this wretched vagabond, this drifter gray before his time, whose unfocused gaze reflects sorrow and indifference, is the eternal struggle between instinct, purpose and groundless convictions. He must choose between virtue (knowledge) and vice (ignorance). With its crooked, decaying roof, broken windows and shutters, and laundry hanging from the transom, the White Swan Inn, a jug impaled on its gable, offers a picture of immorality that tempts and threatens to hold him back. His steps lead him to the entrance of a bountiful field of grain. At the very moment when he is about to pass through the gate, he turns his eyes away from it. With a hand trembling with indecision, he points to the right path. Will he follow it and gain freedom? Or will he succumb to the suffocating forces of unreason? Disenchantment, suffering, he tells us, is universal and indiscriminate. It begins at birth for both man and beast. It is the duel between his repudiation of an unalterable fate, of a fixed and inevitable future -- and his concept of the world as a godless and irrational affair of ceaseless striving and affliction -- that leads him to shake the last remnants of religiosity. The journey is arduous, the course littered with hazards. It is a one-way voyage at the end of which, he will learn, freedom awaits. H. B.