Bosco
Jheronimus van Aken (Bolduque, c. 1450-1516), familiarly called Joen and known as Jheronimus Bosch or Hieronymus Bosch, in Spanish Bosch, was a painter born in the north of the Duchy of Brabant, in what is now the Netherlands, author of an exceptional work both for the extraordinary inventiveness of his figurations and the subjects treated as by his technique, which Erwin Panofsky described as an artist "remote and inaccessible" within the tradition of Flemish painting to which he belongs.
Bosch did not date any of his paintings and relatively few bear a signature that could be considered non-apocryphal. What is known of his life and his family comes from the few references that appear in the municipal archives of Bolduque and, especially, in the account books of the Nuestra Señora brotherhood, of which he was a member. sworn member. Of his artistic activity, only a few non-preserved minor works are documented, as well as the commission for a Last Judgment that Felipe el Hermoso made for him in 1504. Documentation produced during the painter's lifetime has not survived of any of the works currently attributed to him and the characteristics of his singular style have only been able to be established from a small number of works mentioned in literary sources, all of them after his death. of the painter and, in some cases, of doubtful reliability since the genuine works of Bosch could not be distinguished from those of his imitators very early on. in leaving followers and counterfeiters who would make his themes and imaginations a true artistic genre, also spread through embroidered tapestries in Brussels and prints, many of them signed by Hieronymus Cock.
Philip II, among the first and most distinguished collectors of his works, was able to gather a significant number of them in the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and the El Pardo palace. The first critics and interpreters of Bosch's work also arose around him. Jerónimo Fray José de Sigüenza, historian of the Escorial foundation, summarized the reasons for this preference in the singularity and depth of the painter, characteristics that made him different from any other, because, according to him, he said:
the difference that [...] there are of the paintings of this man to those of the others, is that the others sought to paint the man as it seems out; he only dared to paint him what is inside.
Biography
Jheronimus van Aken, a member of a family of painters, was born around 1450 in the Dutch town of 's-Hertogenbosch (ducal forest, in Spanish somewhat unusual Bolduque, in French Bois-le-Duc), northern capital of the Duchy of Brabant in what is now the Netherlands. From & # 39; s-Hertogenbosch, commonly called Den Bosch, he took the name with which he was going to sign some of his works.
With just over seventeen thousand inhabitants in 1496, Bolduque was the second largest city in the north of the Netherlands, behind only Utrecht, and one of the largest cities in the Duchy of Brabant, after Antwerp and Brussels. Bosch's grandfather, Jan van Aken (c. 1380-1454) settled in Bolduque from Nijmegen, in the Duchy of Gelderland, where his great-grandfather, Thomas van Aken, had acquired citizenship in 1404. If, as is generally believed, the surname Van Aken corresponds to a place name of origin, the family must have come from the German Aachen (Aachen). Anthonius (c. 1420-1478), father of Bosco, like his three older brothers, was also a painter. He records that in 1461 he was commissioned to paint the doors of the altarpiece of the brotherhood of Our Lady in its chapel in the church of San Juan, which he did not complete. A year later he acquired a house on the eastern side of the Market Square, the house called "In Sint Thoenis" where he set up his workshop, damaged in the fire that devastated the city in June 1463. Married to Aleid van der Mynnen, the couple had three painter children: Goessen (c. 1444-1498), Jan or Johannes (c. 1448-1499) and Jheronimus, the youngest, as well as two daughters named Katharina and Herbertke.
There are no certain data from the first years of Bosch's life. The first documentary news of him is from April 5, 1474 when together with his father and his older brothers testified in favor of his sister Katharina in the mortgage of a house. By acting together with his father in a second document dated July 26 of the same year, it is presumed that on that date he would not have yet reached the legal age of twenty-four years that would have allowed him to act independently, which has served as the starting point for fix the year of his birth around 1450. His artistic training had to take place in the paternal workshop, where, according to the tax records, after the father died (1478), the two older brothers continued to reside with their mother and then also his sister-in-law and nephews, sons of Goessen: Johannes, a painter and sculptor, and Anthonis, a painter, who kept the workshop open until at least 1523. Since no documented works attributable to the remaining members of the Van Aken family are known, It is not possible to know what teachings he received, although it is possible to assume that they were those of a local and provincial workshop. Only a wall painting of the Calvary with donors in the choir of the church of San Juan, painted around 1453, but still Gothic and alien to the Flemish novelties, has been linked to the grandfather, and some details, such as the thin silhouette of the body of Christ, are also found in the Crucified Christ with Donor (Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique), painted by Bosch around 1485, while the scale and arrangement of the donors is similar to that of another of Bosch's earlier works: the Frankfurt Ecce Homo, before being hidden under repaints.
The following news is already from 1481. On January 3, "Joen the painter" sold his older brother the quarter that corresponded to him in the family house in the Market Square. Months later, on June 5, He appears in a document as the husband of Aleid van de Meervenne, owner of the house called "Inden salvatoer" in which the marriage was established, located in the most elite northern façade of the same Market Square. Aleid, born in 1453, was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant family with property in houses and land in and around Bolduque, which was to be further increased when her brother Goyart van de Meervenne died in 1484 and a little later, in 1492, also his sister Geertrud, established in Tiel. Her eldest son, Paulus Wijnants, lived for some time with Bosco and Aleid, who had no offspring. Although the couple must have signed some kind of prenuptial contract whereby Aleid kept his assets after Bosch's death and was able to pass them on to his nephew Paulus, heir to his fief in Oirschot, Bosch acted in some economic transactions on behalf of his His wife and his large income allowed him to lead a comfortable life, which has been related on occasion to the freedom he would have enjoyed when choosing his subjects and his artistic orientation.
.jpg)
In the academic year 1486-1487 he entered the Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap (Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Lady) dedicated to the cult of the Virgin and governed by a strict religious rule. In 1500 the brotherhood had some fifteen thousand external members and a much smaller number of sworn brothers, around sixty, initially only clergy, and a small number of swan brothers., members of the urban elites and in charge of providing the birds that were consumed in the annual banquets that the brotherhood celebrated around the Christmas holidays. "Jeroen the painter" presumably attended the New Year's banquet of 1488 as a sworn brother, as recorded in the minutes of the meeting. Apart from the Swan banquet, the institutional confreres celebrated between eight and ten banquets a year in rotation in the private homes of their members. Bosco was responsible for organizing the one held in July 1488, which was attended by the secretary of the King of Romans, the future Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. In 1498 he was in charge of the Swan banquet, this time at the brotherhood's headquarters, and On March 10, 1509, he again received the sworn brothers in his home. It was a special meeting, held in Lent, in which only fish was consumed, paid for by Bosch, and fruit and wine in charge of the widow of Jan Back, who had been Burgomaster of Bolduque, in whose memory the agape. After attending a mass in the chapel of the brotherhood, as recorded by the secretary in the account book, the sworn brothers paraded two by two to the house of brother "Jheronimi van Aken the painter who calls himself Jheronimus Bosch".
In May 1498, he signed a power of attorney in favor of the city council so that it could close deals in his name which, together with the absence of documentary news for the immediately following years, has served to support a trip to Venice in around 1500 of which there is no proof. In reality, the documentary gaps are constant in Bosch's biography, but nothing indicates that he was absent for a long time from his hometown. According to what a local chronicler described it, Bolduque was a "pious and pleasant city" during Bosch's lifetime. Although dependent on the ecclesiastical aspect of the bishopric of Liège -until 1560 it had no bishop or cathedral- at the beginning of the 16th century it had about thirty religious buildings, attended in 1526 by 930 religious and 160 beguines. In its vicinity there were also ten other abbeys. Erasmus of Rotterdam himself had studied classical languages there when he was around seventeen, between 1485 and 1487, although his memory of the time he had spent in Bolduque residing in a convent of the Brothers of the Common Life was very negative: « wasted time» according to what can be read in the Compendium Vitae, perhaps written by Erasmus himself, although almost on his own he had had the opportunity to read a good book.
For the rest, religious institutions were not the only clients the painters had. Wealthy citizens and unions also commissioned works from artists. Goldsmiths, bell ringers and wood carvers constituted powerful artisan groups in the city, as were the guilds of embroiderers and glassmakers, in charge of providing colored stained glass windows to churches and monasteries. Some of Bosch's few documented works are related to them. Thus, in the accounting year 1481-1482, when the confraternity of Our Lady commissioned a new stained glass window for their chapel from the local glassmaker Willem Lombart, the contract stipulated that in its execution it should take as its model the sketch provided by "Joen the painter.", for which he had collected a certain amount for the linen paper used for the drawing. He also provided models for the embroiderers, as evidenced by a payment recorded in the 1511-1512 course for the "sketch of the cross" for a blue brocade chasuble. For the coats of arms that appear on the side tables of the Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi in the Prado Museum, together with the donors and their patron saints, there is evidence that the triptych was commissioned by Peeter Scheyfve, dean of the Antwerp draper's guild and his second wife, Agneese de Gramme. Senior officials and members of the local bourgeoisie, as revealed by their shields, were also the commissioners of the Ecce Homo triptychs (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and the Lamentations of Job (Bruges, Groeningemuseum), both considered works of the workshop.
The most important commission received by Bosco of which there is documentary evidence is that of a large Last Judgment for which in September 1504 he received from the Duke of Burgundy Felipe el Hermoso thirty-one six pounds as an advance. That same winter the duke and his father, Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg, visited Bolduque, but there is no news that they made him other orders and it is not even possible to know if that Last Judgment was completed. Other documented commissions are of a very minor nature; Thus, for example, in 1487 the Table of the Holy Spirit, a charitable institution, commissioned him to paint "a new cloth in the entrance room and a deer's horn", and in 1491 the brotherhood of Our Lady paid him 18 stuivers for lengthening and rewriting the panel with the names of the sworn brothers, the painter having given away as much of his work.
Bosch died in the first days of August 1516, perhaps as a result of an epidemic, apparently of cholera, declared in the city that summer. On the 9th of that month, funeral services were held for the painter in the chapel of Our Lady of San Juan church, belonging to the brotherhood, whose brothers, as usual, covered part of the expenses, carefully noted in the brotherhood's account book. In addition to the dean, deacon and subdeacon, officiating at the solemn funeral mass, the singers, organist, bell ringer, poor people gathered before the chapel, and gravediggers and pallbearers received various amounts for their participation in the funeral, as would be expected of a funeral córpore unburied. The year of death is also confirmed by a list of deceased brothers of the brotherhood, prepared between 1567 and 1575, in which, among the deaths of the year 1516, it was stated: «(Obitus fratrum) Aº 1516: Jheronimus Aquen(sis) alias Bosch, insignis pictor». coat of arms— a simple legend explained: «Hieronimus Aquens alias Bosch, seer vermaerd Schilder. Obiit 1516» ("Jerome Aachen, known as Bosch, very famous painter, died 1516").
Style
“Much admired and marvelous creator of strange and comic images and singularly far-fetched scenes”, as the Italian traveler Ludovico Guicciardini wrote in 1567 in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, Bosco put his satirical vein at the service of a moral discourse based on the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, with frequent allusions to sin, the transience of life and the madness of man who does not follow the example of the saints in his life. "imitation of Christ", as taught by the Brothers of the Common Life, very influential in Bosch's environment, without this implying a translation into images of the texts of Geert Grote or Tomás de Kempis.
Bosch's painting is ambiguously inscribed in the Flemish tradition from which, at the same time, it subtly departs in imagery and technique. Already Karel van Mander, fascinated with his painting, observed that he used such thin layers of paint that he often let the backgrounds show through. In some respects his technique lacked the refinement typical of the primitive Dutch. But this new technique, which on the other hand was not exclusive to Bosch, allowed the painter to work faster, as the thin layers of color dried earlier, and at a lower cost.. On a preparation based on chalk white applied to the support, Bosco drew with a brush and with a dark material with some charcoal in its composition. Infrared reflectography makes it possible to study the underlying drawing which, broadly speaking, can be grouped into two types. The first group is made up of works that start from schematic drawings and with hardly any modeling, in which only the main lines and the folds of the clothing are indicated. In them, changes to the initial idea are made in the color application phase, an example of which is Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos in Berlin. A second group, less numerous, to which belong the tables of the dismantled triptych of the Path of Life (The Ship of Fools in Paris, the Allegory of the Intemperance from New Haven, Death and the Miser from Washington and the Peddler from Rotterdam) and the Table of Deadly Sins (Museo del Prado), they present a more finished drawing, modeled with long strokes and in some areas parallel. After the drawing, once executed in several phases, the application of color was carried out in very thin layers and often only one. Finally, with precise touches and a fine brush, he brought out details and highlights.
The main novelty of Bosch's painting, the «new path» that, according to Fray José de Sigüenza, he would have chosen to do, lies in the use of burlesque and humorous elements, «putting in the middle of those jokes many beauties and strange things ». However, neither the introduction of moral concepts through satire nor the creation of fantastic images were truly absolute novelties. Some iconic sources in engravings and drôleries have been pointed out to explain minor details of his figurations. One of these iconographic sources may be the one used for the giraffe that appears on the panel of paradise in the Garden of Earthly Delights (Museo del Prado), taken from the same prototype that served to illustrate the Italian manuscript of the trip to Egypt by Ciriaco de Ancona written in 1443. engraving of the Flight into Egypt by Martin Schongauer; In addition, in the monochrome figure of God the Father painted on the outer doors of the same triptych, we have seen the possible influence of a woodcut by Michael Wolgemut for Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum published in Nuremberg in 1493, which would establish a term post quem for his painting. Dendrochronological dating of the table, however, would allow that date to be pushed back to 1480 or even earlier, making the triptych of the Garden one of Bosch's earliest works, when traditionally it had been believed, on the contrary, to be from his last period, which illustrates the enormous difficulties that arise when trying to order Bosch's work chronologically. In short, originality Bosch's radicalism lies not so much in the creation of fantastic images as in having collected a tradition of marginal arts to apply it to panel painting, typical of altarpieces.
The interest in landscape is also a characteristic common to all his production, as it is to Jan van Eyck. A work such as the Adoration of the Magi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York can demonstrate this. Concordantly dated around 1475, among the painter's first works, Charles de Tolnay dismissed the panel as pastiche precisely because he found the abundance of gold and the fitting of the archaic figures inconsistent in a landscape with a very modern, typical of the most advanced stage. It is this importance of the landscape in the work of Bosch that has led Bernard Vermet to propose a chronological arrangement of Boschian production according to its evolution. At the extremes would be, on the one hand, the "flat, without perspective" landscape and with "typical little trees" of the Garden of Earthly Delights and, on the other, the "primarily modern" landscapes of the Carro of Hay (Museo del Prado) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony from the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. Considering the modernity of the landscape —and the Renaissance conception of the table leg— the Extraction of The stone of madness could not be placed among the painter's early works either, as has usually been considered, although, as Vermet also admits, taking the painting of the Garden of Earthly Delights to an early date, around to 1480, is equivalent to assuming a notable precocity in the painter. The landscape plays a prominent role in The Temptations of San Antonio Abad in the Museo del Prado, which seems to have undergone some changes since its original conception, when the treetops were less leafy and the sky had more development. The elevation of the horizon line dwarfs the figure of the saint and anticipates what Joachim Patinir would do a few years later. The dendrochronology dating of the panel indicates, however, that it could have been used as early as 1464, like the panels of the Garden of Earthly Delights, and the pictorial technique based on very light layers of color is the Bosch's own, although his autography has been questioned.
Work
The gaps in the documentation mean that no work can be attributed to Bosch with absolute certainty. Nevertheless, a certain consensus has been reached in attributing between twenty-five and thirty paintings to him, taking as a starting point what the written sources coincidentally attributed to him: the creation of a world of fantastic beings and infernal scenes. But the early success of these scenes, converted into a genre by copyists and imitators, together with the absence of data regarding the operation of the workshop, makes it difficult to distinguish the autograph works from what are replicas of the workshop or copies, perhaps, of originals. lost. The posthumous fame of Jheronimus Bosch spread, more than in his hometown, where none of his works are preserved, in the south of the Netherlands, Italy and, above all, Spain, where already in the collection of Queen Elizabeth the Catholic one included a painting of the Magdalena or of the Egyptian Mary attributed to him. Described in the post mortem inventory of 1505 as «another smaller table [...] that has in the middle a naked woman with long hair, her hands together and at the bottom in the golden frame a sign with letters that says jeronimus", it could be a gift from Juana I of Castilla, daughter of Isabel and wife of Felipe el Hermoso, to her sister Isabel of Aragón. Two of the first critics and interpreters of his works also flourished in Spain. works, of which they provided interesting news: Felipe de Guevara and fray José de Sigüenza.
Felipe de Guevara, owner of various Bosch works possibly inherited from his father, Diego de Guevara, who had been Felipe el Hermoso's mayordomo, wrote around 1560 Commentaries on painting addressed to Philip II. In them, dealing with Bosch's creations, which he included in the genre of what he called "ethical" paintings, which "show the customs and affections of the minds of men", he charged against the numerous copyists and forgers who had come out of him. in Flanders, lacking in their prudence and decorum and with no more ingenuity than knowing how to age their paintings in the smoke from the chimneys to pass them off as old, so that they were already infinite, as he said, the falsely signed with his name:
... And for Hyerónimo Bosco has stood before us, and reason will be to decease the vulgo, and others more than vulgo of an error than his paintings have conceived, and that is, whatever monstrosity, and out of order of nature they see, then they attribute it to Hyerónimo Bosco, making him inventor of monsters and chimeras. I don't deny that he didn't paint stunts of things, but that just for a purpose he was trying to hell, in the qual matter, wanting to figure devils, he imagined compositions of admirable things.
This which Hyeronimo Bosco did with prudence and decorum, they have done and do others without discretion and judgment; for having seen in Flanders what I accept was that kind of painting of Hyeronymous Bosco, they agreed to imitate him, painting monsters and invariate imaginations, implying that this was only the imitation of Bosco.
Ansi come to be infinite the paintings of this genre, sealed with the name of Hyerónimo Bosco, falsely inscribed; in the quales to him it never happened to put his hands, but smoke and short wits, smoking them to the chimneys for dalls greater authority and antiquity.
Guevara, despite everything, and alluding to Bosch's nervous technique and lack of finishing, distinguished one of those followers, better than all the others, who signed with the name of the master and imitated him in everything, except in the finished patient:
...but it is fair to give notice that among these imitators of Hyeronimo Bosco, there is one who was his disciple, the qual for devotion of his teacher, or for accrediting his works, inscribed in his paintings the name of Bosch, and not his. This, even if so, are paintings very much to estimate, and he who has them must have tenellas in much, because in the inventions and moralities, he was tracking after his teacher, and in the work he was more diligent and patient than Bosco, not departing from the ayre and galanía, and from the coloring of his teacher. Exempl of this genre of painting is a table that V.M. [Philip II] has, in the qual in circle are painted the seven mortal sins, shown in figures and exemplos...
.jpg)
Shortly after the death of Felipe de Guevara (1563), King Felipe II offered his widow and her son Ladrón de Guevara, heir to the estate, the purchase of some houses and plots in Madrid, next to the Puerta de la Vega, and various paintings from his collection for a value of 14,000 ducats or 5,250,000 maravedis. Among the paintings that interested the king were various canvases with mythological subjects without the author's name, four tables with landscapes by Joachim Patinir and "A table of a rod and two terçias high, with two doors, which when open are three rods wide, and it is the Hay Wain, by Geronimo Bosco, by his own hand." The lot also included five other canvases attributed to Bosco:
- A lie of three rods wide and vara and terçia high, which are Two Çiegos that guides one another, and behind a blind woman.
- Another two-wheeled hare and one tall, which is a Flander-like Dance.
- Another hanço de vara y dos terçias de ancho y vara y terçia de alto que/es/Unos Çiegos are hunting for a wild boar.
- Another nickname of a Witch, of rod and stubborn length and a tall rod.
- Another four-hundred lie, where it is cured of the Madness; for guarnesçer, for all others are garrisons.
The Triptych of the hay wagon was once again carefully described in the inventory of the first delivery of artistic works to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in 1574:
A painting board with two doors, in which is painted of pinzel a hay cart that take of all the states, which denotes vanity after it walks; and on the hay a figure of the guardian angel and the demon and other figures; and on the top of the board God the Father; and on the right hand table the creation of Adam and other figures of the same story; and on the left hand the upper hand the upper hand the Infier
This Guevara Haywain was the second to be incorporated into the royal collection, in whose possession was another specimen cited by Ambrosio de Morales. It is probable that Guevara's copy is the one still preserved in El Escorial, ostentatiously signed on the right panel and, despite what is indicated in the inventory, a copy of the original version, the one currently kept in the Prado Museum. Although the dendrochronology dating of the specimen from El Escorial, between 1498 and 1504 as the earliest dates in which wood could be used -1510-1516 for the Prado version- together with the quality of its execution and other minor details, such as the jug on the table on which the monk is sitting in the central panel, which in the autograph version was left uncolored, indicates that it could have been a replica made in Bosch's own workshop and not a late copy.
Other works assigned to Bosch in the document of the first delivery of works to the monastery of El Escorial were three versions of the Temptations of Saint Anthony, of which only the version has now been identified The triptych of the Adoration of the Magi (Museo del Prado), which was arranged in the lower priory cell, the Table of the Deadly Sins (Museo del Prado), kept in the apartments of Felipe II, and the Camino del Calvario or Christ Carrying the Cross (Monasterio de El Escorial), intended for the vicarious chapter, a work considered to be a safe autograph after some doubts had been expressed and of which another larger and ornate version is known, although with minor figures, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The canvases described among the assets of the Guevaras acquired by the crown have not been able to be located, but their subjects denote the genre of painting, between satire and social criticism, with which Bosch's painting was related. Well known is the theme of the Extraction of the stone of madness, an illustration of the incurability of human stupidity. Described again in the inventory of the old Alcázar in Madrid from 1600 as «A canvas by Hierónimo Bosco, mistreated, painted in tempera, in which there is a surujano [sic, for surgeon] who is treating a man's head», It cannot be the table now in the Prado Museum and apparently owned, before 1529, by Bishop Felipe de Borgoña. The popularity of the theme, which is also very present in Dutch literature as an emblem of madness, is illustrated by the abundance of versions and replicas directly or indirectly related to Boschian models.
Two blind men leading each other, illustration of the evangelical parable (Matthew, 15,14: «and if a blind man leads another blind man, both will fall into a ditch»), belongs to with the Removing the Stone of Folly to the very genre that Paul Vandenbroeck has called "foolish literature". The original has been lost, the Boschian composition can presumably be known from an engraving by Pieter van der Heyden according to Bosch. Intellectual blindness rather than physical, represented in the print by two vagabond musicians with a Santiago pilgrim staff, thus appears associated with begging and uprooting, which for Bosco, interpreter of the nascent Dutch bourgeoisie, who identified wisdom and virtue, it amounted to the display —and condemnation— of vicious, ethically reprehensible behavior. It is the same way of expressing himself, through an inverse symbolization, that is found in The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, another common place in the literature of foolishness illustrated by Bosch in one of the tables from the dismantled Triptych of the Path of Life (Paris, Louvre Museum).
_001.jpg)
The blind, the object of cruel entertainment, were once again the protagonists of the canvas that was described as Some Çiegos are hunting a wild boar pig. In this case, the original Boschian has also been lost, although its composition can be recognized in a drawing by Jan Verbeeck, a painter from Mechelen, kept at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Knowledge in Spain of the composition drawn by Verbeeck remains well accredited by the existence of a copy of the same model painted in grisaille on one of the walls of a noble house located in the Plaza de San Facundo in Segovia, which was owned by Ana de Miramontes y Zuazola, wife of Jerónimo de Villafañe, warden of the Reales Alcázares in 1565. The pastime, known as "beating the pig", related to the feast of San Martín, is also represented in another lost composition by Bosch, known only as San Martín y los pobres, one of the tapestries from the series called Disparates del Bosco, originally embroidered for the King of France Francisco I (National Heritage, El Escorial Monastery).
In his Description of the forest and Royal House of the Prado (1582) Gonzalo Argote de Molina noted the presence in that Royal Site of eight panels of Bosco, «painter from Flanders, famous for the nonsense of his painting”, among them some Temptations of Saint Anthony and the painting of a “strange boy” born in Germany who looked seven years old three days after birth, “who helped with an ugly figure and gesture is a figure of great admiration". In 1593, new paintings by Bosch were incorporated into the monastery of El Escorial, the most important of which The Garden of Earthly Delights now on deposit at the Prado Museum, which the document of delivery he described as "a painting on oil panel, with two doors of the bariety of the world, encrypted with various nonsense by Hierónimo Bosco, which they call Del Madroño", for one of the fruits that appear in it. With the famous triptych New temptations of San Antonio arrived at the monastery, a Judgment encrypted in disparate ates and Various unidentified nonsense by Hieronymus Bosco, in addition to the Crowning with thorns with five sayones, acquired together with the Garden of Earthly Delights in the auction of Fernando de Toledo, natural son of the Grand Duke of Alba. No wonder Fray José de Sigüenza could write in his history of the foundation of the monastery of El Escorial, published in 1605 within his History of the Order of Saint Jerome, that "among the paintings of these Germans and Flemish, which, as I say, are many, are distributed throughout the House many of a Jerome Bosco".
Rejecting the vulgar opinion, which only finds whimsical extravagances in Bosch's painting, Father Sigüenza classified his paintings into three genres, authentic "books of prudence and artifice": devotional paintings, with motifs taken from the life of Jesus, as were the themes of the Adoration of the Magi and Christ Carrying the Cross, where "no monstrosity or nonsense is seen", but rather the humble spirit of the wise men from the East and the rabid envy of the Pharisees contrasted with the innocence that manifests itself in the face of Christ; a second group of paintings that act as mirrors for the Christian, made up of the various versions of the temptations of Saint Anthony, which gave Bosco the opportunity to "discover strange effects" by representing the saint with a serene face and contemplative, "full of peace the soul", among fantastic and monstrous beings, "and all this to show that a soul, aided by divine grace (...) although in fantasy and to the eyes of outside and inside it represents the enemy what can move laughter or vain delight, or anger and other disordered passions, will not be part to demolish him or move him from his purpose»; a group to which the Table of Deadly Sins also belonged, with the sacraments painted in the corners as remedies for sin, although what is represented there is actually the end times; and a group of paintings with a more macaronic appearance , in last place, but "of great ingenuity, and of no less benefit", to which belonged the triptychs of the hay wagon , based on Isaiah 40,6: All flesh is hay and all its glory is like a flower of the field, and The Garden of Delights, whose center is a strawberry or arbutus tree, "which in some parts they call mayotas, which is hardly appreciated when it is finished". Fray José de Sigüenza's interpretation of the Garden of Earthly Delights, when there were more than two centuries to go before the triptych began to be known by that name is, of course, the first and fully valid of the interpretations that have been given for a work considered to be one of the most enigmatic in the history of painting. Lack of knowledge of the circumstances in which the commission took place and the dates of its execution, as well as the personality of the client and his original destination, make it difficult to understand some images that are presumed symbolic. It has been thought that it could have been commissioned around 1495 by Henry III of Nassau or, more likely, by his uncle, Engelbrecht II, adviser to Duke Philip the Fair, for his Coudenberg palace in Brussels, as he would have seen it there on the 30th. July 1517 Antonio de Beatis, secretary of Cardinal Luis de Aragón, on his visit to the Netherlands. The description left by De Beatis of the garden, if it was, is, of Modes, quite imprecise and as if made from memory, prioritizing the playful nature of what was represented, since what he said he had seen on his journey, without naming its author and among mythological "bellisime pictures", were:
some paintings [tavole] of various and extravagant things, which represent seas, skies, forests, fields and many other things, some that come out of a marine mussel, others that are defecated by cranes, women and white and black men in various actions and positions, birds and animals of all kinds and with great naturality, things so pleasant and fantastic that it is not possible to describe them for those who have no knowledge of them.
In May 1568 the Garden was confiscated by the Duke of Alba from William of Orange, a descendant of the Nassau family and leader of the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands. This may be due to the defense of his orthodoxy by Fray José de Sigüenza, an orthodoxy that has only been questioned later by Wilhelm Fraenger, who made Bosco an adept of the Adamite sect, and some other defender of "alternative" approaches, to which critics have lent little credibility.
The relationship of the Nassau family with Bosch's painting is also verified through Mencía de Mendoza (1508-1554), marquise of Zenete and third wife of Enrique III of Nassau. A rich and cultured woman, close to Erasmus, at the age of fifteen she was married to Enrique de Nassau, with whom she lived in Flanders between 1530 and 1533 and between 1535 and 1539. Jan Gossaert and Bernard van Orley worked in her palace in Breda, among others. in 1532 he painted a complete gallery of portraits commissioned by Doña Mencía. Widowed, in 1541 she remarried the Duke of Calabria and settled with him in Valencia, from where she kept in touch with Flanders through Gylles de Brusleyden, founder of the Louvain trilingual college, who was also her artistic adviser, and Juan Luis Vives. Doña Mencía gathered an important collection of works of art, among which the tapestries stood out, but also a good number of paintings, many of them sold at the public auction in Valencia six years after her death. Three of them, according to the inventory made in 1548, they were attributed to "Jerónimo Bosque":
and have another painting of Jerome forest of an old and an old one with a wooden garrnision round the old one with a mushroom of eggs in the hand/ is of hanço
and have another painting of Jerome forest of the tower of Babylon has high/ is of lie
and have another painting of Jerome forest of St Joan evangelist has a chalice in the hand has a rod and three palmos and wide a rod and a palm/ is of lienço
In his funerary chapel in the former convent of Santo Domingo, for which he had commissioned a series of eight tapestries called de las muertes based on designs by Van Orley, his heir, Luis de Requesens, had placed the Triptych with scenes of the Passion of Christ or of the Insults, with the Crowning with thorns on the central panel, the work of a disciple or Follower of Bosco (Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia).
Just one year before the publication of Sigüenza's Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo, the life of Ieronimus Bos written by Karel van Mander came to light, collected with the remaining lives of Italian and Flemish painters in his Schilder-boeck. Van Mander, who admitted not knowing the dates of Bosch's birth and death, but considered him truly ancient, offered an accurate description of his technique, notably different from that practiced by his contemporaries when using light inks. and transparent applied, as he explained, in compact spots and "often with the first brushstroke of oil, which did not prevent his works from being very beautiful". As for the topics covered, he quoted the verses of Dominicus Lampsonius and abounded in the presence in his painting of "infernal specters and monsters whose contemplation turns out to be much more terrifying than pleasant". However, with what is currently known of Bosch's painting, it is not possible to know which of his paintings Van Mander came to see. Neither the Flight into Egypt with a dancing bear, which he apparently saw in Amsterdam, nor the Holy Monk arguing with heretics who was at the home of an amateur in Haarlem, presumably the "trial by fire" with Saint Dominic de Guzmán facing the Albigensian preachers, nor Hell with Christ's descent into Limbo, can be related to any of the works now known, and the Christ Carrying the Cross in which "we are presented with a more serious painter than is usual for him", is a theme that is repeated so often in the works of Bosch (El Escorial, Vienna) as well as that of his followers (Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten).
Late descriptions of the interior of the church of San Juan de Bolduque, with its many altarpieces "worthy of being compared with the sculpture of Praxiteles and the painting of Apelles", suggest that some of them may have been painted by Bosch, although the preserved documentation mentions exclusively his father, Anthonius, and his older brother, Goossen, and only in relation to the unfinished high altar. In 1548 the then Prince Philip II visited the church. The chronicler of the most happy trip, Juan Calvete de Estrella, reports that the prince admired its forty altars there, but he only describes a clock that had, along with an Adoration of the Magi, a Last Judgment, with a heaven and hell "which is a thing of admiration and puts religion and fear in the spirits". The local chronicle said of the altars of the choir and of the chapel of the brotherhood of Our Lady that they were adorned "with scenes made according to the extraordinary art of Hyeronimus Bosch". The painting was, on the first of the two aforementioned altars, the creation of the world in six days, for Koldeweij possibly a copy of the Prado's Garden of Earthly Delights, and in the wings of the second Abigail with David and Bathsheba and Solomon, which actually appear to have been painted between 1522 and 1523 by Gielis Panhedel, a painter from Brussels. In addition, the The doors of the San Miguel altarpiece, with the stories of Ester and Judit, could also be by Bosco, according to the aforementioned chronicle, together with an Adoration of the Kings in the chapel of the miraculous image. Efforts that have been made to identify some of these paintings have been inconclusive. The most elaborate attempt to relate some of the works currently preserved with those mentioned in the church of San Juan is the interpretation formulated by Jos Koldeweij of the primitive composition of the main altarpiece of the brotherhood. According to this interpretation, and although the documentation does not mention his affairs, the Saint John the Baptist from the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and the Saint John on Patmos from the State Museums in Berlin would have formed part of that altarpiece, faces interiors of the doors of a box with sculptures that would be located in the upper body or attic of the sculpture altarpiece. The thesis, accepted by the members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP), has been vigorously contested by Stephan Kemperdick, curator of the Berlin museum, for chronological reasons - the Berlin panel could not be painted before 1495 - and iconographic. The reverse painted with scenes from the Passion in false grisaille inside a translucent sphere, like a globe, similarly as found on the outer doors of the Garden of Earthly Delights, but, unlike these, with the complete sphere on a single panel, it makes a second similar sphere on the reverse unlikely from the table in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, in which, on the other hand, there are no signs of having ever been painted.
The presence of Bosch's works in Italy —two triptychs and a polyptych, all in Venice— is very old, but the written testimonies they have left behind are extremely scarce. Related to the painter's hypothetical trip to Italy, some of them could be found in the possession of Cardinal Domenico Grimani as early as 1521, when the humanist Marcantonio Michiel visited his valuable collection. Among other Flemish paintings he described in his Notizia d&# 39;opere di disegno Michiel found three works attributed to Ieronimo Bosch interesting, due to the smooth rendering of their oil painting: "La tela dell'Inferno, con la gran diversità de monstri", the " fabric delli Sogni» and that of Fortuna with the whale that swallowed Jonah.
Even though Michiel spoke of canvases and not tablets, the first two—Dream and Hell—have been linked to the four tablets with chimeras i> and scenes of witchcraft cited by Antonio Maria Zanetti in his Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della cità di Venezia of 1733, located in the transit to the Council room of the Palazzo Ducale, although Zanetti was he attributed them to the Civetta, as Herri met de Bles was known in Italy. These, in turn, are identified with the four shutters now known as Visions of the Beyond: The Earthly Paradise, The Ascent to the Empyrean, The Fall of the Damned and Hell (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia, on deposit at the Palazzo Grimani). located in 1733 like the other Venetian works by Bosch in a corridor of the palace of the doges. With it was the Triptych of Saint Wilgefortis (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia), which was already Marco Boschini had alluded to in Le ricche minere della pittvra veneziana, 1664, as a martyrdom of a saint on the cross with many figures, dwelling in particular on a fainting figure at the foot of the cross, which he attributed to a such Girolamo Basi. The identification of the crucified martyr with Saint Wilgefortis, whose beard grew according to legend, is credited to the doubts of Zanetti, who in 1733 double-corrected Boschini by maintaining that it was a crowned saint, not a saint. and not by Girolamo Basi, but by "Girolamo Bolch, as vedesi scritto in lettere Tedeschi bianche", to be rectified again in the second edition of his guide of 1771, when he understood that what was represented was "la crocefissione d'un Santo o Holy martyr".
The Bruges Triptych of the Last Judgment could also come from Venice, presumably found in 1845 in the collection assembled in Raixa (Mallorca) by Cardinal Despuig, a collection made up largely in Italy. Auctioned by his heirs in Paris in 1900, the triptych was disassembled and the side doors were glued on a single panel, according to the Historical-Artistic News of the Museums of the Most Eminent Cardinal Despuig in Mallorca by Joaquín María Rover, where the numbers 111 and 123 contained the tables entitled Hell and Hell and the World with attribution to "Bosch", of whom Rover said that, "Although with a Mallorcan surname, he was born in Bois-le-Duc, in the Netherlands, in the mid-15th century: he spent a large part of his life in Spain, where it is believed that he died." Some details of the description provided by Joaquín María Rover, such as the "original ship with a mysterious figure, at whose prow some angels aligned, mixing the tips of their wings, blow long trumpets", as seen on the left door of the Bruges triptych, would allow confirming that provenance and the presence of Boschian elements taken from this triptych in the work of d e Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, active in Venice since 1521.
In Portugal, the first reports of Bosch's works appear in relation to the humanist Damião de Goes and his inquisitorial process. At just over twenty years of age, in 1523, he arrived in Flanders as a clerk for the Portuguese commercial factory and met Erasmo, who in 1534 put him up at his home in Freiburg for four months. Established in Antwerp, he traveled through northern Europe, fulfilling a commission from the Portuguese Crown, and in 1531 he met Luther and Melanchthon in Wittenberg. He studied at the universities of Santiago de Compostela, Padua and Leuven, where in 1542 he was taken prisoner by the French, attackers of the city, and freed through the mediation of King John III of Portugal. He returned to Portugal in 1545 and in September of that same year, in Évora, he was denounced before the Inquisition court by Simão Rodrigues, one of the founders of the Society of Jesus, whom he had met in Padua. However, it was not until 1571 that he was arrested and tried, being sentenced on December 16, 1572 for having sought a meeting with Luther and Melanchthon and, as a Lutheran, for having doubted the value of indulgences and auricular confession, although later regretted it.
In his discharge, ten months after his arrest, with the protests of a good Catholic, Goes presented the inquisitors with a paper in which he recalled some things that he had given to the churches of the kingdom from 1526 onwards, and among them, highlighting its high price, but also the novelty of its invention, cited "a panel on which it is painted on the crown of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a piece that is worth a lot of money, for perfection, novelty and invention of the work, made by Hieronimo Bosch", which he had donated to the church of Nuestra Señora de Várzea in Alenquer, where he wanted to be buried, to which he had also given a valuable triptych with the Crucifixion that he attributed to Quentin Massys.
As, however, on May 30 the prosecutor said he had new evidence that would demonstrate the little veneration that the prisoner had for sacred images, he protested that he was very devoted to them, of which he had many on his desk and that The kings themselves had gone to see them, in addition to the fact that he had also given the queen, Juana of Austria, two altarpieces, to which he added, in the discharge memorial that he presented on June 16, two other tables, one of the temptations of Job and another with the temptations of Saint Anthony that he had given to the "nuncio Monte Polusano", later Cardinal Giovanni Ricci of Montepulciano, nuncio in Portugal from 1545 to 1550, "who kept me near duzentos cruzados, hand-painted the great Jerónimo Bosque, as he commanded me to commit by João Lousado and João Quinoso that he sold them. E eu lhos mandei em presente». Both the Crowning with Thorns (London, National Gallery and El Escorial) and the Temptations of Job (Witches, Groeningemuseum), are well-known themes of Bosch's production and his followers, although the trace of the tablets that belonged to Goes has been lost and could not be directly related to any of the preserved ones. In the same way, it does not seem that the table of the Temptations of Saint Anthony given to the nuncio of Rome can be identified with the triptych now preserved in the Museu de Arte Antiga de Lisboa, one of the most copied pieces. and imitated from the Boschian production of which, however, there is no news prior to 1882, when Carl Justi was able to see it in the Ajuda palace, within the collection of Luis I, from which it went to the Necessidades palace, residence of Carlos I and, after the proclamation of the Republic, to the Lisbon museum where it entered in 1913.
Interpretations
In the same way as Guicciardini or Lampsonius, Marcus van Vaernewijck, author of a history of Ghent, considered Bosch to be the "creator of demons". It is precisely this aspect of his painting that focused the interest of his copyists and followers. They popularized and vulgarized the infernal scenes inhabited by the extravagant figures that from the first moment were related to the work of Bosch, as Felipe de Guevara warned, although Bosch himself —as he said— never made those monstrous figures without purpose and containment. This was not understood by Francisco Pacheco, who in The art of painting, whose first edition is from 1649, even having news of Philip II's taste, corrected the enthusiasm of Father Sigüenza for the work of flamenco. For Velázquez's teacher, painters should be concerned mainly with the "greater and more difficult things, which are the figures", and flee from divertimentos, always despised by the great masters, but sought after by Bosch,
with the variety of stews he made of the demons, of whose invention our Felip King II liked, as it manifests how much he gathered together of this genre; but, to me see, make it too much Father Fray Josefe de Cigüenza making mysteries those licentious fantasies that we do not invite the Painters.
Another Baroque treatise writer and, like Pacheco, a painter himself, Jusepe Martínez, in his latest Practical Discourses on the Art of Painting, maintained that Bosch, whom he considered a native of Toledo, Although trained in Flanders, he had deserved "great admiration" for his singular way of painting the torments of hell and other extravagances charged with morality, "and many agree that our Don Francisco Quevedo, in his Dreams, used the paintings of this man witty". Mentions of Bosch are frequent in Spanish literature of the Golden Age. Remembered as a painter of infernal scenes and ugly monsters, without delving into his morality and often in comic situations, he is cited, among others, in the verses of Alonso de Castillo Solórzano and Lope de Vega or in the prose of Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo and Baltasar Gracián. Also, although with a different intention, he remembers the flamenco painter Francisco de Quevedo, who, among other insults, called Góngora "Bosco de los poetas". What he meant by this is explained by another allusion to the painter located in The Possessed Bailiff, precisely one of those Dreams that Jusepe Martínez considered inspired by Bosch's paintings. Giving the floor to a devil, Quevedo wrote in it:
But leaving this, I want you to say that we are very sense of the potages that you make of us, painting us with claws without being owls; with tails, having devils, with horns, not being married; and evil beards always, having devils of us that we can be hermits and correcters. Remedy this, that little has been Jerome Bosco there and asking him why he had made so many guises of us in his dreams, said that because he had never believed that there were demons really.
Since the extravagant devils of Bosch, despite Lampsonius and Karel van Mander, vulgarized and popularized do not cause fright, but mockery, the fault, Quevedo would say, lies with the irreligiousness of the painter. The one who thought so was not only the lord of the Tower of Juan Abad. The same argument was used, but now against him, in The Court of Just Vengeance, a somewhat ingenious allegation against Quevedo attributed to Luis Pacheco de Narváez, to accuse the satirical poet of the same offense, who would have imagined his devils influenced by the atheist Jerome Bosco:
He makes some evil demons; others, among us, lamps, lefts, corcovados, romos, bald, mulattoes, zambos, lame and savannah... the judges... said that don Francisco de Quevedo seemed to be apprentice or second part of the atheist and painter Jerónimo Bosque, because everything that this man executed with the brush, making a copy of doubt (...)
At the end of the 19th century there was a revival of interest in the work of Bosch. The first monograph dedicated to the painter, the work of Maurice Gossart, dates from 1907 and is entitled, significantly, «Jeröme Bosch: Le "faizeur de Dyables" de Bois-le-Duc". The growing interest in psychology together with the development of psychoanalysis and surrealism prompted studies on the work of Bosch, although focusing on the explanation of his world of visionary and mysterious images. As if his works were loaded with hidden signs, they tried to unravel them by searching for astrological or alchemical symbols, if not the heretical messages of some obscure sect. The formulations that achieved the greatest impact in this order were those of Wilhelm Fraenger. His theses, published in 1947, the first to study the personality and work of Bosch from the point of view of the heresiarch, however, are described in the most current studies as "extravagant". The problem, common to all these hypotheses highly speculative and scarcely interested in differentiating Bosch's work from that of his imitators, as Nils Büttner has pointed out, it is the "lack of attention to historical perspective [which] has resulted in the frequent disregard of from existing sources".
Greater attention to the scant data provided by the documents, such as the well-known membership of the Nuestra Señora confraternity as a sworn member, which implied a certain approximation to ecclesiastical status —sworn members were required to tonsured and at designated festivals they participated in religious ceremonies wearing pluvial capes with liturgical colors—, their closeness to the urban elites, to which they belonged by marriage, and what is known of their clientele, together with the perspective provided by a global vision of his painting, such as the one exhibited by fray José de Sigüenza, in which over and over again he admonishes the viewer against sins with promises of redemption, have made, according to Eric de Bruyn, that the most recent studies consider mostly to the painter, recovering the explanations of Sigüenza, as "a religious moralist and satirist whose works express a traditional Christian point of view".
Cataloging
.jpg)
The members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) catalog twenty-one panel paintings and twenty drawings as autographs. They also analyze four works that they consider to be from the workshop, understood in a broad sense, seven that they attribute to the painter's followers and two more (Extraction of the Stone of Madness and Table of Deadly Sins, both in the Museo del Prado) about which doubts persist between assigning them to the workshop or to unspecific followers of the teacher. The arrangement of the autograph paintings is not chronological, but rather iconographic, grouped into four blocks: Saints, Life of Jesus, Last Judgment (Bruges, Vienna and Visions of the Beyond of Venice) and Moralities, which comprise the dismembered triptych of the Path of Life or Street vendor and the triptychs of the Haywain and The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado. The Stefan Fischer catalogue, arranged chronologically, adds to the autograph works the Table of Deadly Sins, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, and the four poorly preserved panels of a triptych with the Universal Flood (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), which the members of the BRCP have as the work of the workshop., the triptych of the Last Judgment in Bruges, Groeningenmuseum, which he attributes to the workshop or to a former collaborator of Bosch, perhaps, as he calls it, his main disciple, and does not take into consideration the fragment of the Temptations of Saint Anthony from Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, of safe autography for the members of the BRCP, recovering an old attribution. The Museo del Prado, by his side, after the studies carried out in the laboratory of the museum itself and its Technical Office, maintains the autograph of the controversial Temptations of s an Antonio Abad together with the Extraction of the stone of madness and the Table of the deadly sins , all three from his collection; and in the catalog of the exhibition of the V centenary, it includes as works by the hand of Bosco, according to the BRCP, the Temptations of Kansas City and the triptych of the Last Judgment of Bruges. In addition, the Adoration of the Magi in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art), for the components of the BRCP the work of the workshop, could be, for the curators of the centenary exhibition, the work of the master with the participation of the workshop For its part, the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, owner of the Christ Carrying the Cross questioned by the members of the BRCP, also decided to maintain the attribution of the work to Bosch after further analysis and to confront the different points of view of the specialists in a round table, in which only Jos Koldeweij from the BRCP maintained the attribution to a copyist. The number of works currently considered autographs is, in any case, much less than the seventy-three cataloged by Mia Cinotti as works of Bosch or attributed to him, or the seventy-one that were cataloged as such in 1981, some of them definitively excluded as dendrochronological analyzes carried out in the 1990s had shown the youth of the wood used as support, cut after the painter's death. This is the case with the Crowning with Thorns in El Escorial, which could not have been painted before 1527, or the Weddings at Cana in Rotterdam and the Ecce Homo of Philadelphia, whose execution dates are to be pushed back to 1557 or later.
Contenido relacionado
Johannes Vermeer
Music sheet
Guipuzcoa