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