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Death and the Miser (detail), c. 1485–1490.

Oil on panel, 93 × 31 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

At the approach of the year 100 °CE, people believed that the Judgement predicted by Christ to occur at the millennium was imminent. When it did not come in 1000, or near that time, the chronicler and Cluniac monk, Raul Glaber, wrote:

There occurred, throughout the world, especially in Italy and Gaul, a rebuilding of church basilicas. Notwithstanding, the greater number were already well established and not in the least in need, nevertheless, each Christian group strove against the others to erect nobler ones. It was as if the whole earth, having cast off the old by shaking itself, were clothing itself everywhere in the white robe of the church.

The solemn projections of the end of the world reached their most modernised climax in 1997, when 39 members of a computer-related cult followed their leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, in a suicide contract to beam themselves up to a spaceship presumably trailing in the wake of the Hale-Bopp Comet that was plunging through the heavens that year.

An essayist in The New Yorker commented on their fantastically flawed mission: “Though science is stronger today than when Galileo knelt before the Inquisition, it remains a minority habit of mind, and its future is very much in doubt. Blind belief rules the millennial universe, dark and rangy as space itself (14/04/1997, 32).

Seeming to reinforce the presumptions from the New York Academy of Sciences’ conference were references that abounded in the national media reflecting increased interest in astrology, psychic phenomena, and magic as well as the related fields of Satanism and witchcraft.

An article on witchcraft (New York Times, 31/10/1998) centred around a group of “Wiccans” (the modern name of so-called witches, derived from a neo-pagan, pseudo religious group called “Wicca”) operating in Salem, Massachusetts. That city, site of the 17th-century witches’ trials, was said to have become a centre of tolerance for “alternative spirituality”, including New Age beliefs and contemporary witchcraft groups such as the Temple of Nine Wells and the Witches League for Public Awareness:

Claiming that theirs is a peaceful, nature-oriented religion, quite unlike early devil-worshipping societies, the Wiccans have organised educationally, even politically, to correct misapprehensions about witches and their modern motivations.

A tabloid article quoted from a list of “the world’s top Bible scholars” who predicted the imminent end of the world and the coming Apocalypse, which it inferred, would be at the end of the millennium (Weekly World News, 14/05/1996).

The Magician, 1475–1480.

Oil on panel, 53 × 75 cm.

Musée municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

It cited ancient prophecies from Revelations and more recent ones from, among others, the 16th-century prophet Nostradamus about dire natural events to occur at the end of our millennium that seemed to accord with El Niño’s deviant climatic disorders in 1998.

The fact that these events were not as baleful as predicted made the turning of the millennium seem almost anticlimactic – until “9/11”, that is, which many saw as the USA’s Armageddon. Similar predictions and oddities had occurred in the decade leading up to the half-millennium of 1500. As if their predecessors of the first 1000 years had been mistaken about when the Judgement would come, contemporary thinkers expected it to appear without fail in the year 1500. Art historian Charles Cuttler summed up the emotional atmosphere of the time:

It was a time of pestilence and turbulence, of economic, social, and religious unrest; an age which believed in chiliasm, Antichrist, apocalyptic visions; in witchcraft, alchemy, and astrology. It was also a period of extreme pessimism, the natural outcome of a belief in demons fostered by the Church itself. (Cuttler, 1957)

As always, artists were present to give voice and imagery to what otherwise would have seemed unimaginable. Northern poets, known (such as François Villon) and anonymous, as well as sculptors of Romanesque tympana and capitals, had graphically displayed their versions of the terrors to come at the end of the world. Later, in the proto-Renaissance period, Gothic revivalist painters depicted these anomalies in their altarpieces. Possibly the most vivid and detailed were those of the Hollander Hieronymus Bosch, which shall be the subject of this book.

A 17th-century English ambassador to Holland expounded on the virtues of painting compared to sculpture, by saying: “An excellent piece of painting is, to my judgement, the more admirable object because it is a near Artificiall Miracle” [sic] (Fuchs, 1978). The historian who quoted this statement repeated the term “Artificiall Miracle” several times to refer to the Dutch penchant for “the meticulous rendering of things observed”.

The term could also accommodate the whole spectrum of Dutch art from Jan van Eyck to Jan Dibbets for its relevance to the astringent yet probing combination of subject and essence that is peculiarly Dutch. In this sense, the term might even apply to such seemingly disparate artists as Hieronymus Bosch and Piet Mondrian. One artist made real the unreal and the other made unreal the real, but they pursued their uncommon aims through lovingly treated surfaces that survived them as “Artificiall Miracle[s]”.

I think Bosch and Mondrian were linked in other important ways. As Nordic artists, they belonged to a group that “has never been content with the mere reproduction of an object”, as art historian Oskar Hagen put it. Both of these artists lived in a century of millennial consciousness and both responded to this consciousness in their work.

A case could be made that Mondrian was a millennial artist of our era. At a great distance from Bosch in time, circumstance, and ideology, Mondrian presented a vision of what the modern world could be, if we looked towards harmony rather than tragedy, which he saw not only in war but in cultural manifestations that had become mired in particulars rather than essentials.

Table of the Mortal Sins, late 15th century.

Oil on panel, 120 × 150 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Table of the Mortal Sins (detail: Envy), late 15th century.

Oil on panel, 120 × 150 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Table of the Mortal Sins (detail: Anger), late 15th century.

Oil on panel, 120 × 150 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Table of the Mortal Sins (detail), late 15th century.

Oil on panel, 120 × 150 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

In his years spent in Paris and London between the 20th century’s two world wars, Piet Mondrian invented a painting that did not transcribe existing reality, but “imaginatively constructed” what he called a “new reality” (Mondrian, 1951). Through its containment, purity, and harmonious ordering of parts, Mondrian posited his painting as an aesthetic cosmos, the “clear vision” of the “pure reality” he hoped would come to pass in the ideal world of the future.

Obviously, Mondrian’s 20th-century creations are divided by radically different sensibilities from those of Bosch’s at the end of the Middle Ages – or did the two artists reveal the dark and light sides of human coinage? Perhaps, Mondrian’s paintings show what we could become if we lived in harmony with the universe, and Bosch’s what we would become if we did not heed the Judgement, as seen through two millennial perspectives, five centuries apart.

After turning to Dutch art, in general, Bosch’s background, and his treatment in literature until the 20th-century, I shall concentrate on one of Bosch’s paintings, the Lisbon Temptation of Saint Anthony, because it was likely to have been completed around 1500, the half-millennial time fraught with the fears and uncertainties that such a transitional period brings. I developed an interest in the Saint Anthony theme by seeing an exhibition of modern paintings on this subject in New York City, in 1946.

These had been commissioned from about a dozen of the major Surrealist artists by the producers of a motion picture that was to be based on a story by Guy de Maupassant. Although the story, entitled The Lives and Loves of Bel Ami, pivoted around a painting whose religious power had converted a debauched man, the producers decided to change the subject of Christ walking on water, prohibited by the Hollywood Censorship Office at that time, to Saint Anthony’s temptations by the Devil.

A painting by Max Ernst was chosen as the most provocative treatment and as best suited for inclusion in the movie. This being the time of bare transition from black and white to colour, the Ernst painting was the only thing shown in the film in colour, giving it a powerful impact. (I later saw Ernst’s painting and the others, each fascinating, brought together in an exhibition called “Westkunst”, in the summer of 1981, in Cologne, Germany. I shall use reproductions of some of these paintings in the text.)

The subject of Saint Anthony and his temptations has been of interest to artists through the centuries, in a range from 15th-century woodcutters to Cézanne. It was bound to be a favourite for Bosch, who turned to this theme in at least a dozen paintings and drawings; some of which will be included in the text.

To reveal the richness of the theme through Bosch’s work was reason enough for me to produce one more book on Hieronymus Bosch. Another reason, equally compelling, was the apparent reappearance of many of the beliefs current in the artist’s time as we mounted the transition from the second millennium to the third. I hope that the following account will afford some interest and insights, even for the many current scholars of Bosch.