Talking bosh about Hieronymus Bosch
Judging by the visitors who stepped forward and peered at it, the most popular panel by Hieronymus Bosch on show at the Accademia in Venice is the one showing a tunnel of light leading to heaven, along which angels guide souls one by one.
The Accademia has just finished scrubbing up its Bosches nicely, ready for their despatch to Holland for the grand exhibition at ’s-Hertogenbosch next month to mark the 500th anniversary of the painter’s death. This is the city where he was born in about 1450, and from which he took his name (since it is generally referred to as Den Bosch).
Bosch the painter is a byword for nightmares: things and people impaled; monstrous beasts and giant birds; jagged eggshells imprisoning people or replacing their torsos. This appeals to a modern taste for toying with the unconscious, as if Bosch were a forerunner of Francis Bacon. Yet Bosch was a favourite painter of Philip II of Spain (in a way that El Greco was not), and Philip was the archetypical Renaissance Prince. But it was quite possible to be a Renaissance Prince and collect hundreds of saints’ relics and to value the religious aspect of Bosch.
As Henry Kamen, the biographer of Philip, points out, José de Sigüenza, the king’s librarian and the historian of the Escorial (where several Bosches hung), called his work “a satire in paint on the sins of men”. It does seem that Philip read the pictures more easily than many modern commentators, for a tremendous amount of nonsense is written about them. So it would be a great mistake to value Bosch’s tunnel of light, on a panel depicting The Hereafter, on the grounds that it reminds us of modern accounts of “near death experiences”.
And what are we to make of a triptych that hangs in the Accademia next to
Visions of the Hereafter? It shows a fully clothed woman being crucified. The title given is St Uncumber, but this title is modern, and specific to English, for it is a nickname of St Wilgefortis or St Liberata. St Thomas More is partly to blame, for he liked to satirise worldly exploitation of the cult of saints. Among examples at which he laughs is devotion to St Wilgefortis (whose statue, as a bearded woman, still survives in Westminster Abbey) on the part of women who wanted to get rid of their husbands. “For a pek of otys,” wrote More, “she wyll not fayle to uncumber theym of theyr husbondys.” Hence the nickname St Uncumber.
Bosch’s view of her is quite different. St Liberata was revered as a saint not simply for her kind help in repelling husbands. There is, no doubt, something weird about painting a crucified woman, but artists of Bosch’s era were not frightened of the weird. At the foot of St Liberata’s cross, Bosh painted a man who seems to have a huge gold coin in place of a head and another who has fallen down in a stupor. On the thigh of his stockings he has an owl embroidered.
Owls inhabit many of Bosch’s works. I have seen it suggested that they represent wisdom, even “esoteric” wisdom divulged by the fraternity of the Virgin Mary to which Bosch belonged. In reality these birds, even if cutely painted,
stand for foolishness. In The Garden of Earthly Delights (in the Prado) a fat owl sits on an eggshell encasing the heads of a nude couple brandishing cherries (meaning concupiscence).
In the same painting a giant owl is embraced by a boy. The spectator should know that the sleep of reason produces monsters, and that the consequence of embracing a giant owl (in the central panel) will be a bird-headed monster devouring you (in the next panel) – the vision of hell.