This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.
This extraordinary level of interest is generated by the simple fact that whosoever sees the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch does not soon, it is safe to say, forget them. That’s because they are fantastic works of art. There’s so much going on in a typical Bosch painting (more on that later) that the eye cannot but dart around, taking in the strange imagery. For that reason, Bosch’s work was popular from the very beginning—that beginning being the 15th century, when Bosch was alive and painting away in the lands of Northern Europe we now call The Netherlands. Throughout the ensuing years, Bosch’s star waxed and waned, but his work never passed out of public consciousness completely. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, he was “rediscovered” in full force. The 20th century public loved the outrageous scenarios to be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, artists especially. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington explicitly referenced Bosch in their own work, just to name a few.
A Hard Nut to Crack
But Bosch’s work has always caused trouble for interpreters and critics. Bosch painted weird things. Weird things are hard to interpret and understand. Critics and scholars like to understand. Ergo, Bosch is a problem. Most critics these days tend to agree that Bosch’s paintings were created primarily out of the religiously pious desire to illustrate biblical truths. Some interpreters reject even this basic assumption, as, for example, Ellen Handler Spitz did in her recent article for The New Republic, titled, tellingly, “The Impious Delights of Hieronymus Bosch.” For those (the majority) who do think of Bosch as more or less a religious painter, the specific imagery and symbolism in the paintings is still nearly impossible to pin down. Bosch’s piety was not like other men’s piety. It took on a unique expression.
Let’s take Bosch’s most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (The painting can be viewed in wonderful high-res detail here). The work was painted in oil on oak panels that were meant to be part of a church altar display (as were nearly all paintings painted at the time). The central panel is a flurry of activity, color, shape, form. A couple of pink structures (castles?) buttress a lake or river, in the center of which is a building composed of a sphere emerging from the water and a multi-pronged tower emanating from the sphere. This could be the landscape in a Dr. Seuss book.
The goings-on amongst the humans and animals thronging the areas beneath the castles are challenging to describe, let alone understand. One man is upside down in the water. His legs are sticking up and spread out. Between his legs can be found the stem and fruit of a huge, unidentifiable plant. The spindly branches of another, smaller plant sprout from the fruit of the larger plant. Out of that sprouting emerges a tropical bird. Perhaps it is an egret. What is the purpose of this water gymnastics with unusual fruit? Very hard to say. Much of the imagery and symbolism seems to be Bosch’s own. Why, for instance, is there a man carrying a huge mussel shell on his back, out of which poke the legs of a couple we can assume to be engaged in some sort of amorous pursuit? Probably, that specific image will never be definitively decoded. Perhaps it came to Bosch in a dream.
So queerly idiosyncratic are the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch that art critics and historians have been known to stretch long and hard for an explanation. For a period during the middle of the 20th century, it was en vogue to imply that Bosch was heavy into drugs. Other interpreters suggested that he was essentially mad, or at least caught up with the wild ideas of one late-medieval cult or another. (...)
The common theme to all these wildly divergent speculations is the feeling that the images in Bosch’s paintings were so unprecedented that they must come from the mind of someone who stood apart, a radical of sorts, an outsider for sure. This feeling is heightened by a glance at the work of Bosch’s contemporaries. It can be startling to realize that Hieronymus Bosch lived during almost exactly the same period as Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519). We’re smack in the midst of the High Renaissance here. And da Vinci, for all his unusual qualities, never painted anything like The Garden of Earthly Delights. Indeed, most of da Vinci’s paintings, for all their innovations in form and technique, take up orthodox and well-worn subject matter in orthodox and well-worn ways. The Last Supper, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne—even The Mona Lisa is a more or less straightforward portrait, due respect paid to her mysterious smile.
Not so with Bosch. Even when Bosch did paint more traditional scenes, like a crucifixion, he rarely played it straight. He painted one crucifixion scene that doesn’t even portray Christ. It shows a woman on the cross, probably Saint Julia of Corsica. The right and left panels of the triptych teem with typical Boschian imagery. There are howling demons, sunken ships, blighted hellscapes, odd creatures, ladders to nowhere, fantastical buildings.
by Morgan Meis, The Easel | Read more:
Image: Hieronymus Bosch 
