Inside the Mind of Bosch The Painter of Heaven and Hell Ep 2

St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Currently on display in the Museum of Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, this exquisite painting forms a pair with St. John the Evangelist on Patmos, now held in Berlin. As recently as the 1940s it was discovered that the two paintings may well have been designed as the wings of an altarpiece. It has since been suggested that the altarpiece in question was an artwork that is known to have been made for St. John's Cathedral, Os Hertogen Bosch. As with many of Bosch's paintings, it is difficult to date. Though if the S. Hertogen Bosch theory is correct, the date would be circa 1489. Bosch often liked to portray John the Baptist with a lamb, representing the sacrifice of the saint as an innocent victim of the wickedness of mankind. Some art historians argue that the saint is in fact pointing towards Jesus Christ, whose symbol is the Pascal lamb, John 1 29-36. Bosch's painting differs from other paintings of John the Baptist in the fantastical objects carefully depicted and the range of color tones introduced, establishing a surreal and magical atmosphere. The artist's customary use of curling and twisting plant forms conveys a sense of exoticism, hinting at danger otherwise absent in the piece. The tender and sympathetic face of the saint is echoed by the innocent purity of the lamb, which patiently, even playfully, looks back at the viewer. The Cutting the Stone, completed around 1494. Also known as the extraction of the stone of madness, or the cure of folly, this panel painting has been dated to circa 1494 and is displayed today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The composition refers to a hypothetical procedure in the 15th century involving trepanation and extraction of a stone, thought to be the cause of the patient's madness. Bosch depicts the extraction being performed by a man wearing a funnel hat, removing the stone from a middle-aged man's head. However, Bosch replaces the traditional stone as the object of extraction with the bulb of a flower, while another flower rests on the table. An imposing gothic inscription in gold reads, Mr. Snit Dikeras, my name is Lubbert Das, which translates as, Master, cut away the stone, my name is Lubbert Das. Bosch invites us to view the doctor as a charlatan, pulling a flower instead of a stone, the funnel hat confirming his status as a comedic character. In Dutch literature, Lubbert Das was a stock character, usually employed for humor, providing light entertainment by his foolish actions. The woman balancing a book on her head could be intended as a satire of the Flemish custom of wearing amulets made out of books and scripture, a pictogram for the word phylactery. Likewise, she depicts folly, providing an ironic comment. The man supposed to be insane is being treated by fools, who in turn are supposed to be figures of authority and sense. As the end of the 15th century approached, an influential German astrologer had warned that the end of the world, which would be brought on by catastrophic flooding, would occur precisely on February 25th, 1524. The idea of the Last Judgment took hold in society with Albrecht Durer producing a famous watercolor recording a dream in which he witnessed the final apocalypse, as water crashing down from the heavens onto earth, and Bosch painting the Last Judgment, which covered the same subject, but with an image of hell populated with fantastical devils, evil spirits, metamorphized creatures, and erotic symbolism. Between them, Durer and Bosch, and lesser luminaries no doubt, would have sent shockwaves of anxiety through the ranks of the devoted. Since none of his works carried dates, one cannot be sure when Bosch finished the Last Judgment, though it is estimated that it was completed between 1482-1505. But Selvon writes, Bosch started employing at least one assistant by 1499, and that he was able to hire an assistant at all was a sign that he achieved success. Indeed, with his The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, another piece on the theme of the Last Judgment and painted on a tabletop that was meant for a sinner to reflect on before entering the confessional booth, has been attributed, in part at least, to the hand of an assistant. Around this time, Bosch produced the masterpiece The Temptation of St. Anthony, circa 1500, a triptych that celebrates St. Anthony's strength of faith under intense coercion from the forces of evil. He would return to the story St. Anthony throughout his later career. By now, Bosch's vision was becoming more magnificently expansive. His figures became more lithe, his colors more understated, while the fantasy worlds he presented offered apocalyptic scenes juxtaposed with biblical landscapes of almost idyllic innocence. The Garden of Earthly Delights is unquestionably Bosch's greatest masterpiece and his most iconic work. Indeed, many know his name only through this work. His style had by now reached full maturity with his Earthly Paradise, featuring the creation and temptation of woman perfectly juxtaposed with deeply distressing images of the world of debauchery and pleasure-seeking. The painting's dreamlike, nightmarish quality has become the stuff of mythology and features any number of tiny naked human figures, misshapen animals, and ominous creatures thought to have been conjured directly from the artist's boundless imagination. However, the Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists states that while works such as The Garden of Earthly Delights have an extraordinarily vivid imaginative power, and the subjects are heavily embroidered with subsidiary narratives and symbols, the basic themes are sometimes quite simple, and much of the imagery can be explained in terms of the popular culture of Bosch's age, notably proverbs and devotional literature. It adds that, in purely visual terms, the monsters he painted have analogies in the strange creatures often seen in the margins of medieval manuscripts and in the gargoyles of Gothic architecture, and that even the cathedral at Es-Hertogenbosch has some fine examples of these gargoyles. Generally regarded as Bosch's most famous and ambitious extant work, this triptych dates from between 1490 and 1510. Painted in oil on oak, the outer wings, when folded, reveal a grisaille painting of the earth during the biblical narrative of creation. The three scenes of the inner triptych, likely intended to be read chronologically from left to right, depicts God presenting Eve to Adam in the left side. The central panel offers a broad panorama of nude figures, fantastical animals, oversized fruit, and hybrid stone formations, while the right panel presents a hellscape of the torments of damnation. The aristocracy of the Burgundian Netherlands, influenced by the humanist movement, were the most likely collectors of Bosch's paintings. But there are few records of the location of his works in the years immediately following his death. It is probable that the patron of the Garden of Earthly Delights was Engelbrecht II of Nassau, who died in 1504, or his successor Henry III of Nassau-Breda, the governor of several of the Habsburg provinces in the Low Countries. De Beates wrote in his travel journal that There are some panels on which bizarre things have been painted. They represent seas, skies, woods, meadows, and many other things, such as people crawling out of a shell, others that bring forth birds, men and women, white and blacks doing all sorts of different activities and poses. As the triptych was publicly displayed in the palace of the House of Nassau, it was visible to many, and Bosch's reputation and fame quickly spread across Europe. The work's popularity can be measured by the numerous surviving copies, in oil, engraving and tapestry, commissioned by wealthy patrons, as well as by the number of forgeries in circulation after his death. Some commentators have proposed that Bosch use the outer panels featuring the biblical scene of the deluge to encourage a reading of the triptych in a chronological order. As with Bosch's later triptych The Hay Wain, the inner center panel is flanked by heavenly and hellish imagery. The scenes concern Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, and Hell. God appears as the creator of humanity in the left-hand wing, while the consequences of humanity's failure to follow his will are revealed in all their devastating power in the right. The left panel, illustrating the joining of Adam and Eve, is a scene from the paradise of the Garden of Eden commonly interpreted as the moment when God presents Eve to Adam. Adam wakes from a deep sleep to find God holding Eve by her wrist and giving the sign of his blessing to their union. God is younger-looking than on the outer panels, blue-eyed and with golden curls. His youthful appearance may be a device by the artist to illustrate the concept of Christ as the incarnation of the Word of God. The right hand of God is raised in blessing, while he holds Eve's wrist with his left. Adam's expression is one of amazement, reacting to an awareness that Eve is of the same nature as himself and has been created from his own body. Finally, from the intensity of Adam's gaze, it can be concluded that he is experiencing sexual arousal and the primal urge to reproduce for the first time. The most ambiguous section is the central panel, where humanity is represented as performing hedonistic acts. As naked men and women engage in various pleasure-seeking activities, they appear to revel in an innocent, self-absorbed zeal. Some appear to enjoy sensory pleasures. Others play unselfconsciously in the water. And yet others cavort in meadows with a variety of animals, seemingly at one with nature. In the middle of the background, a large blue globe resembling a fruit pod rises in the middle of a lake. Visible through its circular window is a man holding his right hand close to his partner's genitals, and the bare buttocks of yet another figure hover nearby. This is a work of fiction. The right panel illustrates Hell, a setting that frequents a number of Bosch's paintings. He depicts a world in which humans have succumbed to temptations that lead to evil and reap eternal damnation. The tone of this final panel strikes a harsh contrast, chromatically and thematically, to the other panels. The scene is set at night, and the natural beauty that adorned the earlier scenes is markedly absent. Compared to the warmth of the central panel, the right wing possesses a chilling quality, achieved by cold colorization and frozen waterways, presenting a tableau that has shifted from the paradise to a spectacle of torture and retribution. In the densely detailed scene, cities erupt in fire in the background, while war torture chambers. Infernal taverns and demons dominate the middle section, with mutated animals feeding on human flesh in the foreground. Large explosions in the background throw light through the city gate and spill forth onto the water in the midsection, as a fiery reflection turns the water below into blood. Light illuminates a road filled with fleeing figures, while hordes of tormentors prepare to burn a neighboring village. A short distance away, a rabbit carries an impaled and bleeding corpse, while a group of victims above are thrown into a burning lantern. Bosch is innovative in that he describes Hell not as a fantastical space, but as a realistic world containing many elements from day-to-day human life. The foreground is populated by a variety of distraught and tortured figures. Some are shown vomiting or excreting. Others are crucified using a harp and lute. An allegory of music, emphasizing the contrast between pleasure and torture. A choir sings from a score inscribed on a pair of buttocks, part of a group that has been described as the Musician's Hell. A striking section of the scene concerns the Tree Man, whose cavernous torso is supported by rotting tree trunks. His head supports a disc containing demons and victims parading around a huge set of bagpipes. Often used as a sexual symbol, reminiscent of the scrotum and penis, the Tree Man's torso is formed from a broken eggshell, and the supporting trunk has thorn-like branches that pierce the fragile body. A grey figure in a hood with an arrow jammed between his buttocks climbs a ladder into the Tree Man's central cavity, where nude men sit in a tavern-like setting. The Tree Man gazes outwards beyond the viewer, his expression a mixture of wistfulness and resignation. Art historians frequently interpret the painting as a didactic warning of the perils of life's temptations. Nevertheless, the complex symbolism, particularly in the central panel, has led to a wide range of interpretations over the centuries. Twentieth-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych's central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost. The triptych was first documented in 1517, a year after the artist's death, when Antonio de Beatis, a canon from Molfetta, Italy, described the work as part of the decoration in the town palace of the Counts of the House of Nassau in Brussels. The palace was a high-profile location, often visited by heads of state and leading court figures. The prominence of the painting has led some to conclude that it was specially commissioned. A description of the triptych in 1605 described it as the strawberry painting, due to the fruit of the strawberry tree, featuring prominently in the central panel. Aside from Bosch's fixation on the evil and the beauty of God's universe, he demonstrates a great skill for compositional harmony and a fastidious eye for detail that matched that of the Renaissance painters. Indeed, citing the Garden of Earthly Delights, the famous art historian E. H. Gombrich wrote, In The Ship of Fools, believed originally to be one panel from a triptych, is thought by most scholars to be a response to the publication in 1494 of Sebastian Brandt's hugely popular satirical book of the same name. Like Brandt, Bosch used the ship, which is in fact a small boat, and its passengers and hangers-on as a metaphor for a debauched society as a whole. The gathering of overexcited revelers reveals again Bosch's association between sin and music, although for reasons that are unclear, the musical entertainment is being provided here by a monk and a nun. The ship's overlong mast is topped by a large branch on which is perched an owl, another Boschian motif that signifies the attendance of sin. The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, circa 1500. Continuing Bosch's preoccupation with the theme of the Last Judgment, the Seven Deadly Sins, Wrath, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Pride, are depicted individually around a central circle featuring an image of Christ emerging from a tomb, the Four Last Things. Top left, clockwise. Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell occupy the corners of the frame. Underneath Christ is text that translates as Beware, beware the Lord sees. The banderol on the top quotes from Deuteronomy 32, 28 and translates as They are foolish. They don't understand. If they were wise, they would understand. They would know what would happen to them. The banderol at the bottom, containing text from Deuteronomy 32, 20, translates as I will turn away from them. Then let's see what happens. If one steps back from the painting, one can fully appreciate its symbolism. With a large central circle, Jesus, surrounded by a smaller circle, the Seven Deadly Sins, the image represents the all-seeing eye of God. The Last Things, thought to be the stages the soul passes through upon death, features, for instances, Death. A dying man, attended by family members, receives his last rites while a skeleton, who will deliver the final death blow with an arrow, and a devil and an angel, who will fight over the soul of the man, wait in anticipation of the man's passing, and Heaven. At Heaven's gates, an angel prevents a devil from snatching a woman while Jesus and his angels wait to greet the pious newcomers. In the circle of the Deadly Sins we see, for instance, Wrath. Two feuding peasants who attack one another with weapons. Envy. A married woman is tempted into seduction by a rich man as her poor parents look on enviously. And Pride. A vain and wealthy woman admires herself in a mirror being held up by the devil. Like many of Bosch's works, the painting is on display at Museo del Prado in Madrid. The Prado displays it as an original Bosch, while acknowledging that there is some debate as to whether that claim is fully valid, even if it is generally agreed that it was created in his workshop. The painting contains Bosch's name, just below the banderol in the bottom center. But there is documentation that suggests that a pupil of Bosch worked on the painting and might have added Bosch's name out of respect for the master and or to increase the painting's market value. However, given the rather uneven quality of the painted figures, and although the date of this work is unknown, it is believed to represent Bosch's later work because it features a wide brush technique found in other mature works, such as the Haywain triptych. The most likely explanation suggests the Museo del Prado is that Bosch painted some scenes with others being produced by the unnamed apprentice.