Bosch, Hieronymus

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Hieronymus Bosch

Personal

Born Jeroen Anthonizoon van Aken, c. 1450, in 's Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; died August 9, 1516, in 's Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; son of Anthonis van Aken (a painter); married Aleyt Goyaerts van der Meervenne, c. 1481. Education: Trained as a painter with family members.

Career

Painter. Major works include The Magician, 1475-80, Cure of Folly, c. 1476-80, Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1480-85, St. John on Patmos, 1485, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1490, Death and the Miser, c. 1490, The Ship of Fools, c. 1490-1500, Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1500, The Path of Life, c. 1502, The Haywain, c. 1502, Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1504, The Flood, 1504, Last Judgment, 1505, and Paradise and Hell, c. 1510. Exhibitions: Works included in permanent collections at Museo Prado, Madrid, Spain; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna, Austria; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal; Musée Groeninge, Bruges, Belgium; and Louvre, Paris, France, among others.

Member

Brotherhood of Our Lady.

Sidelights

Dubbed the "discoverer of the unconscious" by no less an expert than psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, painter Hieronymus Bosch remains one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of art. Little is known of his life; his birthdate must be guessed at and no true chronology exists for his paintings. Even his name is a fiction, taken from the Dutch town, 's Hertogenbosch, where he was born, lived, and ultimately died in 1516. His documented paintings, oil on wood, number only twenty-five, but Bosch's influence has been substantial. His paintings are visual exhortations to live a good life, for they teem with writhing and screaming sinners, who are being tortured by the minions of the devil himself. Strange creatures abound, bird-headed monsters and other inventions that seem to prefigure the bizarre world of twentieth-century surrealism.

Indeed, it is the very oddity of Bosch's imagery that has ensured his longevity: careers have been built decoding his iconography and symbolism. Art tourists make pilgrimages to the far-flung museums containing his few masterpieces. Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych, or three-part altar piece

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now at the Prado Museum in Madrid, is one of the most reproduced pieces of artwork in the world, its nightmarish version of hell filled with miniscule detail of the horrors awaiting those who sin. The triptych was Bosch's usual mode, and typically these traced human development from innocence to sinfulness and repentance/punishment.

During his lifetime, Bosch's works adorned the homes of noble and devout families throughout Europe. After his death, the pious Philip II of Spain made it his personal mission to gather the paintings of this Dutch master; thus the core of the Bosch collection now resides in Madrid's museums. Interestingly, for several centuries Bosch's fame was eclipsed; he was thought of as an unsavory heretic if thought of at all. However, in the late nineteenth century he began to make a comeback and his permanent place in the art pantheon was assured by twentieth-century interest in his work, which seemed so modern yet unflinchingly medieval in its outlook.

A Child of the Times

On the strength of a seeming self-portrait done shortly before his death, Bosch's birthdate has been reckoned as about 1450. He was born Jeroen or Jerome van Aken in the town of 's Hertogenbosch, then in the duchy of Brabant, now part of the Netherlands. At the time of Bosch's birth the city had about 14,000 inhabitants and was well known for its cloth industry, as well as for organ builders, printers, and bell-foundries. Though not as large or well known as other Brabant cites such as Brussels or Antwerp, it was the center for religious life in Bosch's lifetime, with fifteen monastic orders and forty churches and chapels. So religious and pious was the town that it was referred to as "little Rome."

Bosch was born into turbulent times. As Stanley Meisler noted in the Smithsonian, "the age was marked by violence and a new and pervasive pessimism." The royalty of the day waged aggressive wars, while idle soldiers passed the time by roaming the countryside, stealing and killing. The plague and other pestilences cast fear in the hearts of peasants and nobles alike; torture was typically used to gain confessions from supposed criminals. "Man's ultimate future seemed ominous with visions of demons, darkness and hell," Meisler wrote. "People saw pious virtue overwhelmed by terrible sin. Preachers and poets cried out against the enormous greed around them."

Bosch, in his worldview, was a child of his times. Deeply religious, he became a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a lay religious fraternity in 's Hertogenbosch. He also grew up in an artistic family. His father, grandfather, several uncles, and a brother were all painters. It is assumed he gained his training at home; he may also have spent some time in Utrecht as a young man.

A Man of Means

About 1480 or 1481 Bosch married the wealthy daughter of a prosperous local patrician. Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meervenne appears to have been considerably older than Bosch; there were no children from the marriage. But his marriage made Bosch a well-off burgher with a house on the market square. By 1486 he is mentioned as a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, which granted the painter some of his first commissions. Others in Bosch's family also worked on commissions for the brotherhood by adorning the chapel of the Virgin in a local church. He designed a stained-glass window as well as some church fixtures, as well as numerous paintings, but all have been lost, probably destroyed during the years of the Protestant Reformation following Bosch's death.

The roughly two dozen paintings that remain can be divided into two main groups: religious paintings and moralizing or allegorical pictures. Of the former, clearly the most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delight, a triptych measuring seven feet in height by thirteen feet in width. Titled after the garden that forms the central panel, it depicts the history of the world, which is also, in Bosch's view, the history of sin. Thus Adam and Eve and their paradise are depicted in the left panel, the garden is the central panel, and hell forms the right panel. In the central panel, young lovers cavort, a scene almost pleasant to modern eyes, but for Bosch's age this was a depiction of the sin of believing that sex is an end in itself and not a matter of procreation. The torments of hell await such transgressors; the right panel depicts the various torments in a highly detailed manner. Strangely enough, many of the instruments of torture in this painting are musical instruments.

Hermits and saints also people many of Bosch's paintings, for they have resisted worldly temptations. His Temptation of St. Anthony is one such depiction, and also one of his most demonfilled works. The Seven Deadly Sins, painted as a table top, also closely details the punishment of those guilty of such sins as gluttony and avarice. Additionally, Bosch was fascinated by the crucifixion, and depicted the prelude to Christ's agony in Christ Carrying the Cross. Other later paintings in this style include Paradise and Hell and The Last Judgment.

Of his moralizing and allegorical paintings, perhaps the greatest is The Haywain, a triptych whose symbolism is taken from Flemish proverbs of the day. In it a hay wagon is depicted, with nuns, monks, and peasants battling one another for a chance to grab the hay. This allegory of the sin of avarice also features a pope and an emperor; no one could escape Bosch's critical eye. Other more secular paintings include Cure of Folly, depicting false doctors extracting a stone from a patient's head, Ship of Fools, in which misguided fools (under an Islamic flag) float about aimlessly in a boat as a metaphor of a directionless or misdirected life, Death and the Miser, and The Vagabond (also called The Peddler). Bosch, like other medieval burghers, held up the poor as examples of sin and folly, often portraying them as symbols of idleness and sloth.

If you enjoy the works of Hieronymus Bosch

If you enjoy the works of Hieronymus Bosch, you may also want to check out the following:

The art of other Flemish Northern Renaissance painters, including Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, and Pieter Breugel the Elder.

In fact, most of the content of Bosch's paintings can be attributed to the thought of the day, although more recent scholars have attached all sorts of meanings and interpretations to his work. There have been theories that he belonged to a heretical branch of Christianity, that he was a drug addict or even a sex deviant. However, these speculations are more fiction than fact. By twentieth- and twenty-first-century standards, his work appears to be surreally enigmatic. Yet in Bosch's day, topics from alchemy to astrology to witchcraft and the workings of the devil were common knowledge. Medieval people also believed that the end of the world was near and that the horrors of hell awaited sinners. Bosch also drew heavily upon folklore to depict folly among humans. Thus, as a contributor for the International Dictionary of Art and Artists noted, "Bosch was a man of his time, deeply involved with the religious and moral concerns of his fellow human beings. His works, however, are timeless, and seem to speak in a special way to the troubled 20th century." Similarly, Meisler wrote, "All of Bosch's paintings pulsate with a lavish symbolism that is obscure today but must have been widely understood five centuries ago."

The Legacy

Bosch left no school of followers at his death in 1516; however, there were imitators of his style, some of whose work has been confused for Bosch's originals. His influence extended to the style of other Flemish and Dutch artists, including Pieter Breugel the Elder, born near's Hertogenbosch just a dozen years after Bosch's death. Bosch's paintings were collected by Margaret of Austria, Philip of Burgundy, and other royals. However, not long after his death, his fame began to wane as a result of the Protestant Reformation as well as changing styles. Much of Bosch's artwork was collected by the Spanish king Philip II, the instigator of the infamous Spanish Inquisition for whom Bosch's work provided a moral compass. By 1574 Philip was already donating Bosch paintings to the monastery of the Escorial outside of Madrid. However, even in Spain many found Bosch's seeming pessimism problematic; his view of humanity's inevitable journey from paradise to sin fell out of fashion, and his symbolism was forgotten by the seventeenth century. While for several centuries Bosch's work was relegated to a historical footnote, beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending for several decades, his work was rediscovered, foreshadowing Freudian psychology and the dreamscape canvases of surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali. A major exhibition in Rotterdam in 1936 renewed scholarly interest in Bosch, an interest that shows no signs of decreasing. Another major Rotterdam exhibition in 2001 attempted to put this medieval master in context. A reviewer of that exhibition for the Economist concluded, "Nothing can diminish the power of Bosch's vision."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Aymes, C. A. Wertheim, The Pictorial Language of Hieronymous Bosch, New Knowledge Books, 1988.

Baldass, Ludwig von, Hieronymus Bosch, Abrams (New York, NY), 1960.

Belting, Hans, Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights, Prestel (New York, NY), 2002.

Dixon, Linda, Bosch, Phaidon Press (London, England), 2003.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Fraenger, Wilhelm, Hieronymus Bosch, Putnam (New York, NY), 1983.

Gaunt, William, Painters of Fantasy: From Hieronymous Bosch to Salvador Dali, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1986.

Gibson, Walter S., Hieronymus Bosch, Thames and Hudson (London, England), 1985.

Harris, Lynda, The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch, Floris Books (London, England), 1996.

International Dictionary of Art and Artists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Koldeweij, Jos, and Bernard Vermet, editors, Hieronymus Bosch: New Insights into His Life and Work, NAI Publishers (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 2001.

Koldeweij, Jos, and Paul Vandenbroeck, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Abrams (New York, NY), 2001.

Lafond, Paul, The Prints of Hieronymus Bosch, edited and translated by Susan F. Gilchrist, Alan Wofsy Fine Arts (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Linfert, Carl, Hieronymus Bosch, Abrams (New York, NY), 1989.

Tolnay, Charles de, Hieronymus Bosch, Reynal/William Morrow (New York, NY), 1966.

PERIODICALS

Antiques, September, 2001, Miriam Kramer, "Hieronymus Bosch," p. 268.

Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, January 4, 2003, "Philip II of Spain and the Imagery of Hieronymus Bosch."

Booklist, November 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, p. 537.

Economist, October 13, 2001, "Trouble and Strife: HieronymusBosch."

History Today, April, 1997, Gordon Marsden, "Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross," p. 15.

Library Journal, February 1, 2002, Kathryn Wekselman, review of Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Drawings and Paintings, p. 93; May 15, 2002, Kathryn Wekselman, review of The Prints of Hieronymus Bosch, p. 93; December, 2002, Kathryn Wekselman, review of Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights, p. 115.

New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967, Ernst Gombrich, "Bosch of Hertogenbosch."

Qualitative Inquiry, June, 1997, Andrea Fontana, "Of Heaven and Hell: Narrating Hieronymus Bosch," p. 237.

Smithsonian, March, 1988, Stanley Meisler, "The World of Bosch," p. 40.

Spectator, September 8, 2001, Nicolas Powell, "Hieronymus Bosch," p. 46.

Time International, September 17, 2001, James Graff, "Hieronymus Bosch: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam," p. 73.