c. 1480–1490.
Oil on panel, diameter: 28 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1510–1516.
Oil on panel, 76.7 × 83.5 cm.
Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.
Ecce Homo, 1475–1480.
Tempera and oil on oak, 71 × 61 cm.
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
He suggested first, however, that the group’s constitution rested upon a tenet of equality of the sexes that is implicit in its very name. Since “the word homines means ‘men’ in the general sense of ‘human beings’, which amounts to claiming for man a dignity that – since it is based on the fact that Adam was made in the image of God – admits no modification on the score of birth or class, rank or possessions… then the distinction between man and woman was also sublimated in the loftier concept of homo.”
This must mean, Fränger thought, that the female enjoyed equal status with man in this society, and if she were thus exalted in position over the inferiority accorded her by the church, she must have lost her denigration as the “sinful vessel”. As to what this implies of the beliefs or activities of these men and women within the society, the writer answered by turning to the Cambrai record. One of the points of indictment stated:
Likewise they created among themselves a peculiar mode of discourse which they call the act of sexual union ‘the joy of Paradise’ or, by another name, ‘the way to the heights’ (acclivitas). And in this manner they speak of such a lustful act to others, who do not understand it, in a favourable sense.
From this statement, Fränger surmised that the cult’s second principle was that its members lived together according to high moral values. To these brethren, “the strictest sanctification of love” was the way by which they could reach human perfection; this estate they saw embodied in Adam and Eve, who were themselves made in the image of God’s divine perfection. The converse became the second principle; that because man is made in the image of God, he can only endure in this highest of all estates by the practice of a sublimated act of love. As to the nature of this act, Fränger saw in the court record two possible answers. To indicate one of them, he quoted the following portion: “Secondly, that the natural sexual act could take place in such a manner that it was equal in value to a prayer in the sight of God.”
In other words, it could mean the natural act so purified in the mind “that it should no longer be felt as a humiliating animal act, but as the expression of an exalting, divine, creative principle”. The scholar preferred to seek the clue in a statement pertaining to another leader of the Brethren (a man who was being tried posthumously), that “he exercises a special mode of sexual intercourse, yet not contrary to Nature, of which he says it was that of Adam in Paradise”. If this “special mode” refers to an act distinct from the animal one, “yet not contrary to nature”, then it is clearly sinless, and could be practiced in perfect innocence – providing pure pleasure not befouled by any sense of shame. In this statement, thought the writer, lay the real meaning of the Earthly Delights centre section. It was an illustration of this “special mode” of sexual play, the “immortal expression to this Adamite eroticism”, that was revealed in the painting, not directly, but secreted in a mesh of symbolic communications. Having brought us to this conclusion, Fränger proceeded to his prime purpose – that of translating “this Free Spirit ars amandi out of the secret code of symbolism into generally comprehensible language”.
This is enough of Fränger’s argument to illustrate the nature of his interpretation and his characteristic mode of thought – a thoroughly rational, in fact, brilliantly logical analysis which on the surface was exceedingly convincing. Upon more careful scrutiny, however, it was the scholar’s logic, not Bosch’s, that he revealed. What Fränger consistently did here was to follow a system of reasoning that set up a hypothesis as an arbitrary starting point and then, through misleading inferences, arrived at subsequent hypotheses and developed the conclusions implicit in them, ad infinitum. A construction of thought was created, no portion of which could be removed without damage to the whole, nor explained without reference to the whole. But the entire structure rested upon the original hypothesis, a very shaky foundation indeed.
This was Fränger’s hypothesis: that the paintings containing the major part of Bosch’s enigmatic symbolism, being in the form of altarpieces, must have been made for a devotional purpose. They contain anticlerical and anti-pagan invective that could have been made neither for the Church nor for a pagan group. An example of the anticlerical has already been shown in the fat monk being served by his nuns in the Hay Wagon. Another is in the pig wearing a nun’s wimple and veil soliciting the affections of a man in the Hell scene of the Garden. Since it was not the practice of a late medieval artist to paint merely for his own satisfaction, nor is it conceivable that private commissioners would have wanted such odd altarpieces for their own chapels, then there must have been a group outside the Church, operating between its severe discipline and pagan anarchy, but fighting both. These paintings must have been made for a heretical sect, therefore, which was forced to hide its ideas in secret symbols whose explanations would clarify Bosch’s enigmatic figures. To Fränger, this meant without question the Adamite cult.
Are the points of the hypothesis defensible? The fact of the traditional altarpiece form strongly implied to the historian a devotional purpose – therefore, he had to seek the type of group, which would use Bosch’s altarpieces for such a purpose. It is not absolutely necessary, however, to think of these paintings as having a devotional purpose. This was not a time of strict adherence to tradition. Northern Europe at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries was in a period of great transition.
Already, the influence of the Renaissance from the South had been felt, entailing a discard of many old forms and ways. There was a growing secularisation, resulting in a patronage for artists widened far beyond the extent of the Church. It is conceivable that the altarpiece form could have been used for a non-devotional painting commissioned by a private patron – merely because it allowed for intriguing complexity. But why could these paintings not have had a devotional purpose for this private patron – or for the Church, for that matter? It is the symbols of the pagan cults, which Fränger called signs of “swampy procreation and ritual promiscuity” that he did not believe could have been shown on church altars. Perhaps they could not be shown on our church altars, but in that time of less tender sensibility, evil practices of all kinds were denounced in descriptive detail from the very pulpits. In fact, such practices are denounced even today from fundamentalist Protestant pulpits.
Ecce Homo, c. 1450–1516.
Oil and gold on panel, 52.1 × 54 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Crucifixion with a Donor, c. 1490.
Oil on panel, 74.7 × 61 cm.
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
Fränger pointed out that Bosch’s altarpieces always present an ideal content to balance the evil. Perhaps this would have justified their use as devotional altar paintings. If the worshipper would reflect upon the ideal scene (for instance, of a saint who remained faithful even in the face of all the forces of evil that Satan could bring to bear on him), he would be prepared to renounce his evil ways. As an added bit of goad, his possible future in hell
