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The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Before undertaking a study of only one of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, I would like to include a critical survey of some of the art historical attitudes towards the artist and his work. This is because they have differed so widely from the first mention of him in 16th-century writings to the present. The writers who commented upon him in the nearly five centuries following the artist’s death compounded such a reputation for the man as a “faizeur de dyables” [maker of devils] (Gossart, 1907), that until the modern period he was hardly considered an artist at all. It was largely his frenzied hell scenes that attracted such attention. When he depicted the creatures and settings of these “hells” in terms of infinitely detailed naturalism, they were so convincing as to seem pure evocation. To the medieval mind, the man who could reveal so plainly its own worst fears must have been a wizard or a madman, perhaps a tool of the Devil himself.

Later writers either reflected this point of view or, following the rationalist aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation, passed Bosch off as representing the worst of Medievalism. When he was mentioned, it was not as an artist so much as a freak performer. Eventually Bosch was obscured and forgotten. It was at least two centuries before there was a revival of interest in him, in the late 19th century. The 20th century saw more emphasis on this man as an artist than at any time in the past and this trend is continued with an almost overwhelming interest in him in the 21st century.

One would expect Italian writers of the High Renaissance period to point out the painter’s strangeness, since his ideation was so antithetical to that of the South. The Florentine historian Guicciardini, in his Description of all the Low Countries (1567), referred to “Jerome Bosch de Bois-le-duc, very noble and admirable inventor of fantastic and bizarre things”. In 1568, The Italian historian of artists, Vasari, called Boschian invention “fantastiche e capricciose”. Lomazzo, the author of the Treatise on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, first published in 1584, spoke of “the Flemish Girolamo Bosch, who in representing strange appearances, and frightful and horrid dreams, was singular and truly divine”.

During the same period in the North, similar statements were made concerning the painter’s work, his demons and hells being mentioned to the exclusion of all else. The Netherlandish historian, Marc van Vaernewijck (1567), called Bosch “the maker of devils, since he had no rival in the art of depicting demons” (Vaernewijck, 1905–1906). Carel van Mander, the Northern counterpart to Vasari, made little more observation of Bosch’s entire works than that they were “gruesome pictures of spooks and horrid phantoms of hell”.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, central panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, central panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Numerous statements in the same vein began to appear in Spanish writing following the influx of so many of Bosch’s paintings into mid-16th-century Spain. King Philip II, himself, was chiefly responsible for the painter’s Spanish popularity. In 1581, when the king journeyed to Lisbon, he wrote in a letter to his two daughters an expression of regret that they had not been with him to see the Corpus Christi procession, “although,” he added, “your little brother if he were along might have been frightened of some devils which resembled those in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch”. Philip owned as many as thirty-six of these paintings, amazing when it is considered that Bosch’s entire output is believed to have been barely forty in number. Such a large collection accumulated in so few years after the painter’s death attests to a fascination on the king’s part – a state of mind that prompted some of the first penetrating writing directed toward Boschian work. This was because the monk, Father José de Següenza, who inventoried the king’s paintings shortly after Philip’s death in 1598, felt compelled to apologise for the king’s obsessive interest in Bosch. Perhaps Father José feared a destructive attention of the Inquisition, because he wrote an elaborate defence of the painter’s orthodoxy and fidelity to nature:

Among the German and Flemish paintings which are, as I say, numerous, many paintings by Jérôme Bosch are scattered throughout the house (Escorial); I should like to speak for different reasons a little longer about this painter, for his great genius deserves it, although people call his work, in general, absurdities, people who do not look very attentively at what they contemplate, and I think for that reason that he is wrongly denounced as a heretic – and to begin there – I have of the piety and zeal of the king, our founder, an opinion such (that I think that) if he [Bosch] had been thus, he [the King] would not have admitted his paintings in his house, in his convents, in his bedroom, in the Chapter of his orders, in his sacristy, while on the contrary, all these places are adorned with them. Except for this reason, which seems very important to me, there is still another which I deduce from his paintings for one sees there almost all the sacraments and ranks and degrees of the church, from the pope to the most humble, two points where all heretics falter, and he painted them with his zeal and a great observation, which he would not have done as a heretic, and with the mysteries of our Salvation he did the same thing. I should like to show now that his paintings are not at all [absurdities], but like books of great wisdom and art, and if there are any foolish actions, they are ours, not his, and let us say it, it is a painted satire of the sins and inconstancy of men.

An interesting counter-reaction to that of the monk is the statement by Francesco Pacheco, the teacher and father-in-law of Velásquez – as written sometime later, in 1649:

There are enough documents which speak of the superior and more difficult things, which are the personages, if one finds time for such pleasures, which were always disdained by the great masters – nevertheless some seek these pleasures: that is the case for the ingenious ideas of Jérôme Bosch with the diversity of forms that he gave to his demons, in the invention of which our King Philip II found so much pleasure, which is proved by the great number of them which he accumulated. But Father Següenza praises them excessively, making mysteries of these fantasies that we would not recommend to our painters. And we pass on to more agreeable subjects of painting.

[Pacheco was a Spanish painter and art theorist of the artistic period between Mannerism and Baroque. He rejected the manneristic delight in mere form and was turning towards an interest in naturalistic illusionism. From either point of view he would have found Bosch’s work unacceptable].

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, left panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, central panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Even though Pacheco’s concern was with Bosch as an artist, he passed him off as an oddity, and this reputation clung to the painter for two and a half centuries to come. During this period there was little attention given by scholars to Northern art at all; when it was considered, Bosch was obscured by the great Netherlandish painters ranging from Van Eyck to Bruegel. It was not until the end of the last century that any respectable scholarship was brought to bear upon the painter. Perhaps this was a consequence of the realistic impulse that entered mid-19th-century painting. Historians began to look for precursors to this realism in the past. They turned again to an interest in Northern art, and in reemphasising Bruegel, “discovered” Bosch. Not only had Bruegel been profoundly influenced in his early works by Bosch’s “drolleries”, but he had probably been stimulated to an interest in “genre” by studying this painter. Bosch had introduced holy figures (and their accompanying devilries) into contemporary interiors and panoramic landscapes to a greater extent than anyone before him. Obviously, the painter deserved the scholars’ attention, but practically nothing was known about this “enigma” of the Flemish school. Spade work had to be done to find even the dates of his life.

Historians such as Jan Mosmans sorted through the aged registers of his native’s ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a Dutch town near the German border, but the results were disappointing. The date of Bosch’s death was discovered in a registry of names and armorial bearings – listed as 1516. His birth date was not found, but because his portrait, which was discovered in the Arras Codex, showed a man of about sixty, his birth was assumed to have been around 1450. There are a few references to Bosch between these dates in the archives of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Several items referred to his having been paid various sums for works commissioned of him. For instance, he received twenty stuivers for a stained glass window pattern made “on a couple of old bed sheets”, the window having been executed by the glassmaker, Willem Lombard. There were notations of larger sums such as of five rhenish guilder, paid for an altar. Bosch must have been active as a lay member of this organisation; in fact, he must have participated in the food preparation for the meetings, because at one time he was paid for twenty-four pounds of beef – “at one Phillips penny a pound”, four ounces of ginger, two ounces of pepper, one-half ounce of saffron, and for the value of a measure of wine.

None of this was very informative about essential details of Bosch’s life, save that, since he was referred to once as “illustrious painter”, he was obviously held in repute as an artist by his fellows. There is no reason to think, from these references at least, that his friends considered Bosch either a wizard or a madman. As to his ancestry, since Bosch’s name often bore the suffix van Aken, it was believed that his forebears were from Aachen, just over the Dutch-German border.

Five van Akens were mentioned in the town records before the time of Hieronymus. One, a teacher named Jan van Aken, was noted in the archives of the city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch’s Cathedral of Saint John, in references spanning several years (1423–1434). The historians believed that this was the grandfather of Hieronymus and probably the artist of the fresco of the cathedral – considered to be one of the artist’s prime influences.

In 1464, Laurent van Aken, possibly the father of Hieronymus, was referred to as a citizen of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. This was the extent of the factual data referring to the artist. The historians were forced to turn back to the evidence of the paintings themselves, but none of them were dated, nor mentioned in contemporary writing. Small wonder then, that this produced confusing results in the historical evaluations of the works.

By approaching their studies with preconceived ideas, the scholars made what now seem like obvious mistakes. For instance, Louis Demonts, in 1919, sketched an evolution of the paintings from the premise that Bosch had evolved in his subject matter from the traditional theological point of view to a personal moral judgement. This led Demonts to date as late works, The Cure of Foll, The Conjurer, and The Ship of Fools – later established on stylistic grounds to be from Bosch’s youth. This same system caused him to date as an early work the Prado Epiphany, seen later by such historians as De Tolnay and Combe as a surpassing synthesis of the artist’s lifetime achievements.

Not until Charles de Tolnay’s definitive treatise, written in 1937, was a satisfactory chronology even established, or the works by Bosch’s own hand separated from those of his disciples or copyists. De Tolnay bore directly on the technical evidence of the paintings. He noted that the beginner is betrayed by archaism – stiff figures, long-waisted and with awkward gestures, having no true existence in space nor relationship with one another and the background, and with few and arbitrary folds in their clothing. By observing such characteristics in some Boschian works, he was able to trace a convincing development from the obviously youthful to those of undoubted antithesis in style and conception. De Tolnay successfully demonstrated that Bosch developed consistently into a great landscape painter and a superb colourist.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, right panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, central panel), c. 1510.

Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Although he never achieved the suavity of an Italian High Renaissance master, in later works he even created a sfumata effect which unified figures and background into a harmonious entirety. De Tolnay’s work in this direction was so convincing that subsequent writers accepted his classifications as almost incontrovertible.

There have been exhaustive attempts to clarify the artist’s subject matter, as well. In De Tolnay’s words: “The oldest writers, Lampsonius and Carel van Mander, attached themselves to his most evident side, to the subject; their conception of Bosch, inventor of fantastic pieces of devilry and of infernal scenes, which prevails still today [1937] in the large public, prevailed until the last quarter of the 19th century in historians.” Then those historians who saw in the painter a precursor to realism, swung completely in the other direction. They studied his works according to exterior influences such as literature, the artistic tradition of the North, historical events, and the medieval interpretation of the Bible.

None of these sources produced any conclusive results on the meaning of Bosch’s cryptic imagery. Again in this realm, one of the finest studies was that of De Tolnay. He went far in establishing current influences that would account for much Boschian iconography. Most importantly, he introduced a knowledge of Freudian psychology, revealing Bosch’s remarkable presentiment of this science. Jacques Combe followed De Tolnay’s lead in his treatise translated into English from the French in 1946, and continuously acknowledged his indebtedness to the prior monographer, but his study was no mere imitation. He suggested many sources of symbolism overlooked by de Tolnay, such as alchemy and the tarot game. He made a strong case for association between Bosch’s ideology and that of the 14th-century Netherlandish mystic, Jan van Ruysbroek.

With such respectable scholastic attention, Bosch had finally come into his own in the mid-20th century as a significant artist. His works were seen not merely as an influence on Bruegel, but as extremely interesting in themselves. They were a deviating but appropriate link within the “Flemish tradition” in painting, with its curiously combined naturalism and symbolism. The work of De Tolnay, together with the increasing interest in Surrealism, had inspired popular interest in Bosch as a painter of the imaginary. It followed that several articles on Bosch were published in the most popular American periodicals, as well as in magazines of art. The popular articles presented Bosch as an interesting, almost freakish fantasist of the past and a precursor to Surrealism in his “queerness”.

In most of the books written in English, as well as translated into English, the more scholarly authors continued to search for the exact sources of Bosch’s symbolism in outside material. Their implication was that Bosch’s symbols, however enigmatic, illustrated images already formed in literature or tradition, and that with enough study these sources would eventually be brought to light and his imagery made comprehensible.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (exterior: The Mass of Saint Gregory), c. 1510.

Oil on panel.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail of exterior: The Mass of Saint Gregory), c. 1510.

Oil on panel.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.