Hieronymus Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert

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      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.

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