Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert
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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 Boisleduc, very noble and admirable inventor of fantastic and bizarre things…” In 1568, the Italian historian of artists, Vasari, called Boschian invention “fantastiche e capricciose.”
The Magician
1475–1480
Oil on panel, 53 × 75 cm
Musée municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Lomazzo, the author of the Treatise on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, first published in 1584, spoke of “the Flemish Girolamo Bosch, who in representing strange appearances and frightful and horrid dreams, was singular and truly divine.”
During the same period in the North, similar statements were made concerning the painter’s work, his demons and hells being mentioned to the exclusion of all else.
Child with a Walking Frame (reverse of Christ Carrying the Cross)
ca. 1480
Oil on panel, diameter: 28 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Netherlandish historian, Marc Van Vaernewijck (1567), called Bosch “the maker of devils, since he had no rival in the art of depicting demons.”
Carel Van Mander, the Northern counterpart to Vasari, made little more observation of Bosch’s entire works than that they were “…gruesome pictures of spooks and horrid phantoms of hell…”
Christ Carrying the Cross
ca. 1480–1490
Oil on wood, 57 × 32 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Numerous statements in the same vein began to appear in Spanish writing following the influx of so many of Bosch’s paintings into mid-sixteenth-century Spain.
King Philip II, himself, was chiefly responsible for the painter’s popularity in Spain. Philip owned as many as thirty-six of these paintings, amazing considered that Bosch’s entire output is believed to number barely forty.
Death and the Miser
ca. 1485–1490
Oil on panel, 93 × 31 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Such a large collection, accumulated in so few years after the painter’s death, attests to a fascination on the king’s part – a state of mind that prompted some of the first penetrating writing on Boschian work.
This was because the monk, Joseph de Siguença, who inventoried the king’s paintings shortly after Philip’s death in 1598, felt compelled to apologise for the king’s obsessive interest in Bosch.
Death and the Miser (detail)
ca. 1485–1490
Oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Perhaps Fray Joseph feared a destructive attention of the Inquisition, because he wrote an elaborate defense of the painter’s orthodoxy and fidelity to nature: “Among the German and Flemish paintings which are, as I say, numerous, many paintings by Hieronymus Bosch are scattered throughout the house (Escorial); I should like to speak for different reasons a little longer about this painter,
Extracting the Stone of Madness
ca. 1490
Oil on panel, 47.5 × 34.5 cm
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
for his great genius deserves it, although in general people call his work absurdities…, people who do not look very attentively at what they contemplate, and I think for that reason that he is wrongly denounced as a heretic – and to begin there – I have of the piety and zeal of the king, our founder, an opinion such (that I think that) if he [Bosch] had been thus, he [the King] would not have admitted his paintings in his house, in his convents, in his bedroom, in the Chapter of his orders, in his sacristy, while on the contrary, all these places are adorned with them.
Extracting the Stone of Madness (detail)
ca. 1490
Oil on panel
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Except for this reason, which seems very important to me, there is still another which I deduce from his paintings for one sees almost all the sacraments and ranks and degrees of the Church there, from the pope to the most humble, two points where all heretics falter, and he painted them with his zeal and a great observation, which he would not have done as a heretic, and with the mysteries of our Salvation he did the same thing.
Crucifixion with a Donor
ca. 1490
Oil on panel, 74.7 × 61 cm
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
I should like to show now that his paintings are not at all [absurdities], but like books of great wisdom and art, and if there are any foolish actions, they are ours, not his, and let us say it, it is a painted satire of the sins and inconstancy of men”.
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
ca. 1490
Oil on panel, 73 × 52.5 cm
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
An interesting counter-reaction to that of the monk is the statement by Francesco Pacheco – the teacher and father-in-law of Velasquez – as written sometime later, in 1649: “There are nough documents speaking 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:
Saint Christopher
ca. 1490
Oil on panel, 113 × 72 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
that is the case for the ingenious ideas of Hieronymus 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 he accumulated. But Father Siguença praises them excessively, making of these fantasies mysteries that we would not recommend to our painters. And we pass on to more agreeable subjects of painting…”
Ecce Homo
ca. 1490
Oil