Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert
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from this “evidence” of the painting, Fränger asserted other instances in which his invention revealed himself. The author saw his face in that of the egg-tree monster placed in the center of Hell as if to demonstrate allegorically a basic doctrine of the cult – that one must make a public confession of sin before being able to return to a “state of purity”. Because a crow can be seen near the man’s “portrait,” Fränger believed this to be his symbol; therefore, wherever there was a crow (as at Adam’s feet in the Garden of Eden, there was the “Grand Master” participating in a cosmic event important to the whole revelation.
Fränger understood the cave of the bride and bridegroom not only to symbolize the consummation of their marriage, soon to take place, but the tie – in with Neo-Pythagorean philosophy, since caves had figured strongly in the history of Pythagorianism. The scholar’s purpose in making these Italian connections was obviously to justify finding in the North such an esoteric community as is known to have existed in Renaissance Italy. (Fränger had stated earlier, when first introducing the idea of the Adamite cult, that it was of particular importance in the early Renaissance period when: “Ideas of Platonic, Augustinian, Neo-Pythagorean and Gnostic origin fused to form an attitude that saw Original man as the archetype of spiritual renewal and hence of a pure, free state of human life”).
To explain his cult’s mysteries according to those of the Italian societies, and their appearance in this Netherlandish cult, Fränger had to introduce the “Grand Master” and show cause for this man’s having brought these ideas back from his own schooling days in Italy-thus the author’s assertion that the man has the look of an Italian intellectual and the further strengthening point that the woman behind him (his “bride”) has Italian coloring and features. Having so thoroughly convinced himself of his assertions, Fränger introduced the elusive “Grand Master” into “early Dutch social and art history [as] a powerful spiritual personality, hitherto completely unknown, one who is worthy to rank with those three great men of the same country and the same century, Erasmus Desiderius of Rotterdam, Johannes Secundus, and Johannes Baptist van Helmont”. Thus, Fränger not only endowed his invention with physical aspect, personality, bride, and philosophy, but he bestowed on him greatness. In the process, he destroyed Bosch not only as a personality but also as an artist.
He did this first by declaring that the altarpiece’s symbolism was a “system of sexual-ethical teachings, in which the pictorial motifs were didactic symbols… clear reflections of Renaissance natural philosophy, and hence patterns of a modern intellectual kind, pointing towards the future”. The author’s more devastating conclusion was that since there was a personality behind the painter’s inventions, his “pictorial ideas were not his own at all, but were laid down for him by a mentor of encyclopedic erudition, with an exquisite sense of detail, yet capable of planning on a magnificent scale and imperturbably sure of his purpose”.
It was not merely subject matter dictation that Fränger believed Bosch had received, but the “mentor” had even designed the color and formal composition. He had obviously designed the color because it bears symbolic relationship in every instance to the idea involved, but he strongly influenced the composition by allowing Bosch to break with his previous practice of placing dominant ideas along the axes of the panels, as in the two “Paradise-panels”, and to disorganize the Hell scene in a manner planned as a symbolic reverse of the very order of the other two “worlds”.
Fränger seemed to believe that such systematic disorganization grew out of a profound understanding of the destructive forces of society that could only belong to a man “who had the ideal image of creative harmony steadily before his inner eye.” It indicated that “the inspirer extended his influence even to the very realm of motifs and forms that has hitherto been regarded as Bosch’s own private territory as ‘faizeur de diables’; and hence the painter’s own created world seems on the point of vanishing…” The scholar went on to push Bosch over the edge with his next words, that if “we have to ascribe even the painter’s most peculiar originality to a mentor, it seems as though his own share in the achievement must sink to that of a craftsman, no matter how highly qualified, merely executing somebody else’s orders… it might have been more logical to devote all our energies to working out the personality of the real spiritual creator and – leaving Bosch on one side – to reinstate the actual origination of this profound work.” At this point, Fränger did admit that “such a strictly logical process would reduce itself to absurdity, since it would be impossible to reconcile it with the visual data of the picture itself, which, in spite of the guidance to which the painter was subject, blossoms out in complete pictorial freedom.”
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