Art historian Charles Cuttler summed up the emotional atmosphere of the time: “It was a time of pestilence and turbulence, of economic, social, and religious unrest; an age which believed in chiliasm, Antichrist, apocalyptic visions; in witchcraft, alchemy, and astrology… It was also a period of extreme pessimism, the natural outcome of a belief in demons fostered by the Church itself…” (“Lisbon,”109).
As always, artists were present to give voice and imagery to what otherwise would have seemed unimaginable. Northern poets, known (such as François Villon) and anonymous, as well as sculptors of Romanesque tympana and capitals had graphically displayed their versions of the terrors to come at the end of the world. Later, in the proto-Renaissance period, Gothic revivalist painters depicted these anomalies in their altarpieces. Possibly the most vivid and detailed were those of the Hollander Hieronymus Bosch which shall be the subject of this essay.
Introduction
7. Illuminated manuscript from the 15th century (c.1470–1480), Flanders (Bruges). National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg
A 17th-century English ambassador to Holland expounded on the virtue of painting over sculpture, by saying: “An excellent piece of painting is, to my judgment, the more admirable object because it is a near Artificiall Miracle.” (Fuchs, 103) The historian who quoted this statement repeated the term “Artificiall Miracle” several times to refer to the Dutch penchant for “the meticulous rendering of things observed.”
The term could also accommodate the whole spectrum of Dutch art from Jan van Eyck to Jan Dibbets for its relevance to the astringent yet probing combination of subject and essence that is peculiarly Dutch. In this sense, the term might even apply to such seemingly disparate artists as Hieronymus Bosch and Piet Mondrian. One artist made real the unreal and the other made unreal the real, but they pursued their uncommon aims through lovingly treated surfaces that survived them as “Artificiall Miracle[s].”
I think Bosch and Mondrian were linked in other important ways. As Nordic artists, they belonged to a group that “has never been content with the mere reproduction of an object,” as art historian Oskar Hagen put it: “There must always be a concomitant vibration in the picture of something spiritual, something indefinable, divinable… it had to be capable of giving simultaneously a real and an unreal, a corporeal and a spiritual picture of things…”)
Both of these artists lived in a century of millennial consciousness and both responded to this consciousness in their work. A case could be made that Mondrian was a millennial artist of our era. At a great distance from Bosch in time, circumstance, and ideology, Mondrian presented a vision of what the modern world could be, if we looked toward harmony rather than tragedy, which he saw not only in war but in cultural manifestations that had become mired in particulars rather than essentials. In his years spent in Paris and London between the twentieth 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, Plastic, 10) 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, or 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 twentieth-century, I shall concentrate on one of Bosch’s paintings, the Lisbon “Temptation of Saint Anthony,” because it was probably completed right 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 had decided to change the subject of Christ walking on the waters, 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 color, the Ernst painting was the only thing shown in the film in color, 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 fifteenth-century woodcutters to Cézanne. It was bound to be a favorite for Bosch, who turned to this theme in at least a dozen paintings and drawings; some of these will be incuded 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 that 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.
8. Armorial of the Confraternity of Our Lady, detail, blank blazon of “Hieronymus Aquens alias Bosch”, Bois-le-Duc, Illustre-Lieve-Vrouwebroederschap
Chapter I: The Literature on Bosch to Wilhelm Fränger
9. Cure of Folly, called also The Extraction of the Stone of Folly, oil on panel, 48 × 35 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 toward the artist and his work. This is because they have differed so widely from the first mention of him in sixteenth-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 diables,” (Gossart) 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 the 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 nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw more emphasis on this man as an artist than at any time in the past and there is continued, almost overwhelming interest in him in the twenty-first 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”.