Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert
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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. The Netherlandish historian, Marc van Vaernewijck (1567), called Bosch “the maker of devils, since he had no rival in the art of depicting demons” (1:137). 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…”
Numerous statements in the same vein began to appear in Spanish writing following the influx into mid-sixteenth-century Spain of so many of Bosch’s paintings. King Philip II, himself, was chiefly responsible for the painter’s Spanish popularity. In 1581, when the king journeyed to Lisbon, he wrote in a letter to his two daughters an expression of regret that they had not been with him to see the Corpus Christi procession, “…although,” he added, “your little brother if he were along might have been frightened of some devils which resembled those in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.”[1] Philip owned as many as thirty-six of these paintings,[2] amazing when it is considered that Bosch’s entire output is believed to have been barely forty in number. 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 directed toward 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 apologize for the king’s obsessive interest in Bosch. 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 Jérôme Bosch are scattered throughout the house (Escorial); I should like to speak for different reasons a little longer about this painter, for his great genius deserves it, although people call his work in general 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. Except for this reason, which seems very important to me, there is still another which I deduce from his paintings for one sees there almost all the sacraments and ranks and degrees of the church, 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. 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.[3]
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 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 Siguença praises them excessively, making of these fantasies mysteries that we would not recommend to our painters.
10. Detail of the Cure of Folly, called also The Extraction of the Stone of Folly, oil on panel, 48 × 35 cm, Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid
11. The Conjurer, oil on panel, 53 × 65 cm, Municipal Museum, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
12. The Seven Deadly Sins, oil on panel, 120 × 150 cm, Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid
13. The Seven Deadly Sins, detail, 120 × 150 cm, Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid
14. The Seven Deadly Sins, detail, 120 × 150 cm, Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid
15. The Seven Deadly Sins, detail, 120 × 150 cm, Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid
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 had rejected the manneristic delight in mere form and was turning toward an interest in naturalistic illusionism. From either point of view he would have found Bosch’s work unacceptable].
Even though Pacheco’s concern was with Bosch as an artist, he passed him off as an oddity, and this reputation clung round 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 Brueghel. 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-nineteenth-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 reemphasizing Brueghel, “discovered” Bosch. Not only had Brueghel 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.
Such historians as Jan Mosmans sorted through the aged registers of his native’s ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a Dutch town near the German border, but the result was disappointing. The date of Bosch’s death was discovered in a registry of names and armorial bearings – listed as 1516.[4] 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.[5] There are a few references to Bosch between these dates in the archives of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, at ‘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 (Pinchart, 273, nt.3). There were notations of larger sums such as of five rhenish gulden, paid for an altar.[6] Bosch must have been active as a lay member of this organization; 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,” for four ounces of ginger, two ounces of pepper, one-half ounce of saffron, and for the value of a measure of wine (Pinchart, 269, nt.5).
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,[7] it was believed that his forebears were from Aachen, just over the Dutch
As quoted in
“[Philip] obtained them from various sources. A few he inherited from Charles V. (his father), who was sixteen years old in 1516, the year in which Bosch died. Indeed Charles could well have known Bosch personally, for the distance between Malines, where Charles lived, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the home of Bosch, is less than eighty miles. Philip bought six Bosches from the widow and son of Felipe de Guevara, a courtier of Emperor Charles and the author of ‘Communtarias de la Pintura’
Translated from the French translation made by de Tolnay (76, note 9) of Siguença’s Spanish text (Fray Joseph de Siguença,
“Names and Armorial Bearings of the Sworn Brothers Both Spiritual and Temporal of the Most Ancient and Most Glorious Brotherhood of Our Dear City of ‘s-Hertogenbosch”. Title translated from Pinchart,
Historian Jan Mosmans claims to have discovered Bosch’s birthdate as being October 2, 1453: “Der Geburtstag des Hieronymus Bosch,”
Translated from the Dutch notation in the registry listed above in note 4, as quoted by de Tolnay from: J. Mosmans,
The name Bosch is a shortened name derived from the Dutch name, ‘s-Hertogenbosch. The French name of the city is Bois-le-duc.