Hieronymus Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert

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      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.

      The Literature on Bosch to Wilhelm Fränger

      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:

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