Hieronymus Bosch

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Header Photo: The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1503 (Detail).

An image as magically beautiful as it is mysterious. Every view of it reveals something new and yet, at the same time, takes you further away from any meaning of it. Now that is art.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH
The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1503 (Detail)
© Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado
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Biography c.1450 - 1516

First recorded in Hertogenbosch in 1480/81. He may have been born there and his name probably derives from it: certainly he spent his life there and died there. His obsessive and haunted world is that of Gothic twilight and is the best surviving expression of some aspects of the waning of the Middle Ages, but it is now largely incomprehensible.

The Surrealists have claimed him as a sort of Freudian avant la lettre, but it is certain that his paintings had a very definite significance and were not merely ramblings of the unconscious mind. For example, the Hay Wain (Madrid, Prado) once belonged to Philip II of Spain and is obviously an allegory on the general theme 'All flesh is grass', just as the Ship of Fools (Paris, Louvre) is a well-known late medieval allegory.

About 1600 a Spanish writer apparently thought it necessary to defend Bosch's memory against imputations of heresy, which seems to show that even then the real meaning of his pictures had been lost. In recent years there has been an elaborate attempt to 'explain' many of his pictures - in particular, the Earthly Paradise (Madrid, Prado) - as altarpieces painted for an heretical cult addicted to orgiastic rites. Not only is there no evidence for this, but it also fails to explain why so many of Bosch's pictures belonged to people of unimpeachable orthodoxy, such as Philip II.

The chronology of Bosch's pictures is far from clear, but it is probably safe to assume that the Crucifixion (Brussels) is his earliest known work. His master is unknown, and the origins of his style are very obscure, but are probably to be found in popular woodcuts and devotional prints.

There are examples in Antwerp, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Cologne, Denver, the Escorial, Frankfurt, Ghent, Lisbon, Munich, New York (Met. Mus.), Philadelphia, Princeton NJ, Rotterdam, S. Diego Cal., Valenciennes, Venice, Vienna, Washington (NG) and Yale.

Notes

Even his contemporaries found the work of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) difficult to 'decode'- and it still presents riddles to art historians today.

Although rooted in the Old Dutch tradition, Bosch developed a highly subjective, richly suggestive formal language. With a mixture of religious humility and satanic wit, he illustrated both the joys of heaven and the cruelly imaginative tortures of hell.

In his pictorial world teeming with surrealistic nightmares, the medieval imagination catches fire in a moment of final brilliance before succumbing to humanism and modern rationalism.