“Poor is the mind that always uses the inventions of others and invents nothing itself. -Hieronymus Bosch, one of the most idiosyncratic painters in all of art history….
About an hour’s drive north of the village where I grew up lies s’Hertogenbosch, the capital of the Dutch province North Brabant. Its most famous son was probably Hieronymus Bosch (born Jheronimus van Aken, ca. 1450 – 1516 – he renamed himself after the town – the Duke’s Forest.) A permanent Jheronymus Bosch Art Center with reproductions of all his works was opened in a local church in 2002; for the last many years the town has also been hosting an extremely popular festival, the Bosch Parade. (Images are from their website and a Dirkjm Photography from the 2022 festival.)
Floats fashioned by individuals sail for a number of days down the river Dommel, its banks and the medieval city walls lined with spectators. All of the floats re-envision snippets of some of Bosch’s art, dependent on the theme chosen for the bi-annual festivity – this year it is Contemporary Demons. A Garden of Delight serves drinks and foods, there is music, and costumed individuals parade around before climbing into their respective floats that reproduce the fantastical and mysterious creatures from Bosch’s paintings.
Locals’ enthusiasm for 15th century art of one of their own is understandable, but it is widely shared internationally. It’s not just the museums (most of his known 25 paintings and a few drawings are housed in Madrid’s Prado), or books and poster industry. From bags, Doc Martin boots, t-shirts, mouse pads to phone cases, there is a whole range of consumer products with printed excerpts from mostly The Garden of Earthly Delights, his late masterpiece. The only other artists I can think of matching this range is Frida Kahlo. Riddle me that.
Quite a number of surrealist painters cited Bosch’s influence over their own creations. His work has made its way into other visual media as well, dance and circus performances among them. (Photographs below are from my last pre-Covid shoot in Montréal for the circus performance Scenes from Bosch Dreams, a production by Les 7 Doigts, a 500th anniversary commission by the Hieronymus Bosch Society, all of it mounted by TOHU. My write-up can be found here. Video snippets here.)
Ballets capture the ominous quality of the paintings, like Compagnie Marie Chouinard‘s Le Jardin de Délices and digital animations (this one commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum for the 500 year Bosch celebration) translate the ideas into modern movement.
So what is behind the contemporary interest and preoccupation? Spectacle and sex come to mind. The inventiveness of his couplings, bestiary and architectural structures are truly spectacular, and easily divided into self-contained narrative scenes, fit for printing or reconstruction into costumed staging. A boon for commercial exploitation.
The weirdness of it all, coupled with sexually explicit imagery, lent itself to certain conspiracy theories, like the proposal banded about in the 1940s that he was a member of the Adamites, a heretical sex cult, or that he was high on ergotic wheat – eating too much moldy bread, in other words.
Serious art historians place his work into a very different context, that of a committed, faithful catholic who was intent to warn of the wages of sin, using every biblical parable under the sun to make his point. The visual referents, in turn, are mirroring imagery found in the churches and cloisters of his hometown (95 gargoyles, for example, in just the main cathedral.) Drolleries in the side margins of theological books and devotionals, put in by sex obsessed monks in abandon, and pictures of foreign animals found in bestiaries of his time and accessible to him are used as templates to create the scenarios that will lead to hell. If you have time, watch this lecture by a British curator on Bosch’s religious conservatism, I found it truly educational.)
But I believe there is something else at work here. The 16th century saw seismic changes in politics and social structuring of societies, not unlike our own. There was a worry (for some, hope for others) of end times, after a famous astrologer predicted the end of the world in early 1524, to be preceded by catastrophic flooding. Bosch, Albrecht Dürer and many other artists picked up on it, pointing to the Last Judgment. The apocalyptic tone of the work might very well resonate with us, not for its religious implications, but due to recognition that our sense of impending catastrophe is best ignored by engaging in all kinds of distracting activities, however frivolous or lustful they might be. The more, the better in fact, to drone out the sense of helplessness.
It is not poor minds who are too lazy to invent their own ideas, but agile ones that sense the relevance of existing, if 500 years old, imagery for its predictive power of a world gone mad. He should be proud of his art’s longevity and prescience. Then again, pride is a cardinal sin….
Music today directly from the painting…