Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail, central panel), c. 1510.
Oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Although he never achieved the suavity of an Italian High Renaissance master, in later works he even created a sfumata effect which unified figures and background into a harmonious entirety. De Tolnay’s work in this direction was so convincing that subsequent writers accepted his classifications as almost incontrovertible.
There have been exhaustive attempts to clarify the artist’s subject matter, as well. In De Tolnay’s words: “The oldest writers, Lampsonius and Carel van Mander, attached themselves to his most evident side, to the subject; their conception of Bosch, inventor of fantastic pieces of devilry and of infernal scenes, which prevails still today [1937] in the large public, prevailed until the last quarter of the 19th century in historians.” Then those historians who saw in the painter a precursor to realism, swung completely in the other direction. They studied his works according to exterior influences such as literature, the artistic tradition of the North, historical events, and the medieval interpretation of the Bible.
None of these sources produced any conclusive results on the meaning of Bosch’s cryptic imagery. Again in this realm, one of the finest studies was that of De Tolnay. He went far in establishing current influences that would account for much Boschian iconography. Most importantly, he introduced a knowledge of Freudian psychology, revealing Bosch’s remarkable presentiment of this science. Jacques Combe followed De Tolnay’s lead in his treatise translated into English from the French in 1946, and continuously acknowledged his indebtedness to the prior monographer, but his study was no mere imitation. He suggested many sources of symbolism overlooked by de Tolnay, such as alchemy and the tarot game. He made a strong case for association between Bosch’s ideology and that of the 14th-century Netherlandish mystic, Jan van Ruysbroek.
With such respectable scholastic attention, Bosch had finally come into his own in the mid-20th century as a significant artist. His works were seen not merely as an influence on Bruegel, but as extremely interesting in themselves. They were a deviating but appropriate link within the “Flemish tradition” in painting, with its curiously combined naturalism and symbolism. The work of De Tolnay, together with the increasing interest in Surrealism, had inspired popular interest in Bosch as a painter of the imaginary. It followed that several articles on Bosch were published in the most popular American periodicals, as well as in magazines of art. The popular articles presented Bosch as an interesting, almost freakish fantasist of the past and a precursor to Surrealism in his “queerness”.
In most of the books written in English, as well as translated into English, the more scholarly authors continued to search for the exact sources of Bosch’s symbolism in outside material. Their implication was that Bosch’s symbols, however enigmatic, illustrated images already formed in literature or tradition, and that with enough study these sources would eventually be brought to light and his imagery made comprehensible.
The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (exterior: The Mass of Saint Gregory), c. 1510.
Oil on panel.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
The Epiphany or The Adoration of the Magi (detail of exterior: The Mass of Saint Gregory), c. 1510.
Oil on panel.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Fränger’s Thesis (Epiphanies and Absurdities)
Triptych of the Martyrdom of St Liberata, 1500–1504.
Oil on panel, 104 × 119 cm.
Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
Wilhelm Fränger began his study of Hieronymus Bosch and his work by deploring the “vulgar misunderstanding” to which the master had been subjected by having his work passed off as mere mummery. Fränger insisted that, with Bosch, symbols “entail a perfect simultaneity of vision and thought” and must be treated as such. The writer considered all other approaches as “fragmentary”, thus presented his study as a total view.
In order to understand why the painter would create a mute symbolism, the art historian sorted through the whole body of paintings, separating those of enigmatic content from those that contain little or none. Only if the “freakish riddles” on which Bosch’s reputation was founded occurred in all of the paintings could they be called “the irresponsible phantasmagoria of an ecstatic”. Fränger found that the deviant content existed only in a clearly defined group of altarpieces – the three large triptychs of the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Lisbon Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the Hay Wagon. In contrast, there was only a small amount of this symbolism in such paintings as the Epiphany triptych in the Prado and the Venice Martyrdom of Saint Julia. The remaining paintings, including those of the Passion and Adoration of the Magi themes, had little or none. He concluded, therefore, that an arbitrary distinction could be made between two main groups – the generally traditional, obviously created for the church, and the non-traditional, disparate ones.
Fränger concentrated on the second group, proposing that they could not have been made for a church congregation since they contained anti-clerical polemic implied by monks and nuns depicted behaving in a scandalous manner. Nor could these altarpieces have been made for pagan worship, since they also attacked pagan “priests” and their ritualistic excesses. Altarpieces, however, pointed to some kind of devotional patronage. The principal targets of their attacks point to a group of paintings outside the domain of the church, at once inveighing against ecclesiastical offences and at the same time fighting the abundant mysterious cults of the period. The only kind of society that could possibly answer the problem, according to Fränger, would be a militant heretical sect. Setting up an ideal contrary to the teachings of the Church, such a sect would be forced to fight the all-powerful tradition, but on the other hand, would find pagan abominations equally abhorrent. If Bosch should paint a devotional altarpiece for a society of this kind, he would mirror their “dual warfare, with all its polar tension” and his “eccentricities” would be explained.
According to the scholar, all previous interpretations of Bosch erred that did not approach his symbolism with this frame of reference. Because Bosch was not intelligible to them, most commentators assumed that he had not intended to communicate – and that the creatures he let loose in these paintings were mere “phantoms of hell”. This thinking placed an emphasis on the hell scenes that Bosch might not have intended. True, there are scenes which are set in the most horrific of all hells, but they are always balanced on the other side of the altarpiece by “an impeccable anchorite, or by Mount Ararat, or by the Garden of Eden”. In other words, if Bosch gave equal weight to the opposed “ideal scenes”, could we not assume that he intended to emphasise these scenes by their very contrast with hell? This added further weight to Fränger’s theory of the heretical sect, because Bosch’s more positive scenes would reflect the idealism of such a society.
The author believed that one of the most widely misinterpreted of Bosch’s paintings was The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. In fact, he concentrated the remainder of his study of Bosch’s ideation upon a new interpretation of this painting. The reason for the confusion, he thought, was that it had for centuries been thoughtlessly associated with another of more obvious message, the Hay Wagon. Both triptychs have flanking panels of a Garden of Eden scene
