The Life of

1450-1516

A new reading of his paintings

Hieronymus Bosch has been a conundrum for five hunderd years: Notorious because of his unrelenting denunciations of the Church, he is still occasionally considered a Christian moralist. Thoroughly familiar with obscure Hebrew texts, he was a child of the Gothic at the dawn of the Northern Renaissance. None of his paintings are dated and for that reason have in the past been arranged in various haphazard chronological orders according to the hunches of the professionals.

During the past 20 years Peter Klein has produced a scientific chronology of Bosch's panels by dendrochonological analysis of their oak planks. For the first time we can read Bosch's oevre like an autobiography of his life. This poses many textural difficulties, but serves to demystify much of Bosch's work. To show this "new Bosch" is the objective of this post.

Bosch's oevre is framed by two large triptychs, a format hitherto reserved to altar pieces. At the beginning stands

The Garden of Earthly Delights - or Lusts, 1468-70
He painted his most famous work when he was 19. It shows a paradise of a sensuous beauty which is neither earthly nor lustful. Its people are curiously disembodied phantoms rising into a Pythagorean Heaven of ever greater perfection - through Love. The origins of Bosch's vision are not difficult to trace to the neoplatonic humanists Marsillio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.



This delicate and most tender pair comes as close to a love scene as the rules of this Platonic Paradise allow.



But, again, it is not the heavenly Paradise of the Christian Neoplatonists, not only is God Father missing, death is part of it!




The chosen souls enter the central panel through a hidden gate from the hellish right wing which depicts Our World burning in a clairvoyant vision of the conflagrations of the 20th century.



From the center of this chaotic hell watch the skeptical eyes of the New Man of Pico della Mirandola's "Oratio De Hominis Dignitate" : "The Supreme Maker said: 'We have placed you at the center of the world, so that you may observe and consider all that is in the world. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper, mold yourself in the form you may prefer."

The Temptation of St. Anthony Triptych, 1504
At the end of Bosch's oevre stands another triptych, an unheard-of and never repeated Hebrew scatology - in the disguise of a "Temptation of St Anthony."? After this monumental work Bosch ceased to paint for the remaining ten years of his life. Once one of s'Hertogenbosch's richest burghers, he died as a financially broken man who was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.

The underlying text of the Anthony Triptych was taken from The Song of Mose, Deuteronomy 32:15 - 33. Every stanza of Mose's harrangue of the Israelites at the time of his death Bosch expanded into some of his most daring symbolic images. St. Anthony is entirely incidental to the subject matter of the triptych. He serves merely to fool the preying eyes of the inquisition. - s'Herogenbosch belonged to the ultra-conservative Archdiocese of Cologne and remained Catholic to this very day.



"They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominable practices they provoked him to anger." [Deuteronomy 32, 16]



"They have provoked me with their idols. So I will stir them to jealousy with those who are no people; I will provoke them with a foolish nation." [Deuteronomy 32:22]

Who was this pre-Renaissance man who painted Gothic altar triptychs, displayed an independent, clearly heretic, anti-Church mind, had a thorough knowledge of obscure Hebrew texts, and conjured up images like no other painter before or after him?

There are several likenesses of him painted long after his death, when his fame and influence reached their peak. One little-known portrait in the possession of Amherst College, shows Bosch in 1485 as I imagine him.