Art Historians Still Can t Explain This Painting

More than 500 years ago, extraordinary images were being painted in the workshop of Hieronymus Bosch. Paintings filled with hidden messages, symbolism and terrifying visions that to this day are still being studied in an attempt to understand the meaning of every detail. But there is one of them that for more than five centuries has been analysed by art historians, and they still cannot fully explain it. This painting is called Tondal's Vision. It was created between 1490 and 1510 in the workshop of Hieronymus Bosch and today it is held at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. It is said to have been created in Bosch's workshop because the authorship of this work is one of the first mysteries surrounding this image. For centuries it was attributed directly to Bosch himself, but some modern experts believe it was created by one of his closest disciples, someone who knew his style so deeply that it is almost impossible to distinguish it from the master's own work. The truth is that we do not know for certain whether Bosch himself painted it or someone from his workshop, but what we do know with certainty is the story that inspired this image. In 1149, an Irish monk named Marcus was at a monastery in Regensburg, Germany when he heard the account of an Irish knight named Tondal. What that knight told him was so extraordinary that Marcus wrote it down in Latin and titled it The Vision of Tondal. The story goes that Tondal was a wealthy, arrogant and unscrupulous knight, a man who lived for pleasure and who completely ignored the consequences of his actions, but one day while dining he fell unconscious and for three days his soul was led by an angel through hell, purgatory and paradise. What this man saw on that journey was deeply disturbing, in hell he witnessed how every sin had its own punishment, every vice had its own place, and Tondal was not only a witness to those torments, in some of them he himself had to participate as a victim before being rescued by the angel and led to the next level. When he woke up three days later, Tondal was a completely different man. The story tells that he distributed his fortune among the poor and devoted the rest of his life to penance. This text became one of the most popular in medieval Europe. It was translated 43 times into 15 different languages and more than 170 manuscripts survive to this day. It was a story that spread across much of the continent during the middle ages and there is a reason for that. As we have seen with other paintings, this was not simply a horror story, it was a tool that priests used in their sermons to convince the faithful that sin had real, concrete and inevitable consequences. It was most effective way of telling people that this would be their fate if they did not live in accordance with biblical teachings. Now, we know that this painting is inspired by this story thanks to the small inscription in gothic letters found in the lower left corner of the canvas. The inscription reads Visio Tondali and if we look carefully, we can also see Tondal lying unconscious, accompanied by the angel mentioned in the story, pointing toward the rest of the painting as if saying, look, this is what you need to see and what there is to see begins at the centre of the composition, where an enormous head dominates the scene, a gigantic pale human face with round eyes that look like empty windows. From its ears grow two trees and from its nose falls a stream of coins that pour into a bathtub where several figures are bathing. Historians interpret this scene as the punishment for greed. In front of that bathtub, a man is seated on a dice while two demons torment him. On top of this creature's head, there is a man with a monkey and an owl and the owls, as we know from other works by Bosch, are not decoration. In the medieval tradition, they represented spiritual darkness, the sin that hides in the night and the presence of evil that watches without being seen. Looking to the left, we see figures being tormented in a river, a demon forcing a woman to look at herself in a mirror and bodies being attacked by different creatures. To the right, other scenes of punishment, such as this man in his bed while three creatures seem to torment him. And in the background, very far in the background, a city burns. At this point in the video, you will already understand why, even being a painting created more than 500 years ago, it has been so difficult for art historians to fully explain it. Although the painting seems to have a clear logic, with a text, a story like that of the knight Tondal and some recognisable symbols, there are questions that remain unanswered. If we try to match each element of the painting to the specific episodes in Tondal's text, the correspondence is not perfect. Some details do not appear in the text, and there are elements, like that gigantic central face that have multiple possible interpretations and that no expert has been able to attribute with certainty to a single source. Is that central face the devil himself? An allegory of greed? Is it the monster known in the text as the beast Acheron, the devourer of the avaricious? Scholars cannot agree on its interpretation, and there is something else we also need to keep in mind. This painting existed for centuries in a very specific context, that of late medieval Europe, where hell was not a metaphor, but a fully accepted spiritual reality. For the viewers of that time, this image was not a fantasy, but a literal representation of what could happen to them if they did not change the way they lived. 500 years later, that context has disappeared, and with it, part of the meaning of the image. What remains is something we can describe, analyse and even classify, but we will never be able to experience it in the same way that someone who saw it for the first time 5 centuries ago did. And finally, there is a question we have not yet answered, one that is also one of the great mysteries of this painting. Was it really Bosch who painted this work? But before answering that question, I would like to remind you that in our catalogue you have this painting, and over 900 carefully selected historical works for you to choose your favourites and begin your own art collection. As in the video you are watching, with our reproductions you can turn your home into your own personal museum. Shipping is free worldwide, and by purchasing from the store, you will be helping me enormously to continue creating videos like this every week. I will leave the link in the description so you can place your order once you finish watching the video. For centuries, everything pointed to this painting having been created by Hieronymus Bosch himself. But in 2016, the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, a group of researchers who spent years technically analysing all of Bosch's known works, published their conclusions. What they found was that the execution of this painting shows differences in finesse and precision compared to Bosch's own hand. The brushwork, the treatment of details and the way the surface is constructed all suggest that whoever painted it knew the master's style deeply, but was not him. According to these researchers, the most likely explanation is that the work was created by someone within his workshop, possibly after his death in 1516, a disciple who had learned to see the world like Bosch, but whose hand was not his. And that, curiously, adds another layer of mystery to this image. Because it means that what we see is not just the vision of one artist, but the vision of someone who tried to inherit a way of understanding the world and did so with such extraordinary faithfulness that for five centuries, it has continued to be debated. I would love to know your opinion on this, and I would also like to invite you to look this painting carefully and leave me in the comments what other meaning you can find in it. Thank you for watching the video until the end. I will be reading your comments. See you in the next video.