by ULRIKE KNOFEL
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of the Earthly Delights” PAINTING/Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid/ Depósito de Patrimonio Nacional
Impaled heads and burning bodies: Hieronymus Bosch, the great Dutch painter whose images depicted the horrors and terror of the past, present and future, died 500 years ago. In the era of Abu Ghraib and Islamic State, his work feels as contemporary as ever
The artist Hieronymus Bosch probably had the most prodigious imagination of his day. He was the great surrealist of the waning Middle Ages. His paintings were both a promise and a threat, intended to convey an idea of what would happen in paradise and, even more so, in hell. He created labyrinths of atrocities and a vocabulary of the bestial. He depicted devils and monsters, but also people being tortured, naked people whose throats were being slit, almost as if they were part of a scene in the latest propaganda video from the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). And then there are images and motifs that seem comedic in their sheer absurdity.
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Last Judgement,” from around 1506
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: Bosch could only have guessed 500 years ago that, half a milleinnium later, eople would still be behaving as they had done thousands of years before his time PHOTO/Reuters/The Washington Post
Bosch, this mysterious painter whose motives were unclear, died 500 years ago, in August 1516. One thing is certain: The Dutchman from the Duchy of Brabant did not spare his audience. He painted what no one had painted before him. And he must have had his own dark humor. In one painting, he depicts a dwarflike being with an upper body that resembles an egg, while the lower body is reminiscent of a lizard. But the gaunt face is that of a human being, with glasses perched on his nose. It is often speculated that this may have been the face of Bosch himself.
He painted this curious being in the corner of a plate, next to Saint Mark the Evangelist foreseeing the End of Time. Did Bosch also perceive himself as a visionary? As someone who wanted to make mankind squirm as it learned of its future? Are his paintings a painted version of gallows humor?
A Unique Universe
This visionary is being celebrated in 2016, eulogistically, of course, with exhibitions, books and films. Almost all museums in his native Brabant are honoring him this year, including the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, which is billing him as a role model for modern artists, and the Brabant Museum of Nature in Tilburg, which is devoting an exhibition to the animals and astonishing mythical creatures in Bosch’s art. His paintings can be seen at the Prado in Madrid, and he is also the main event at the Bucerius Art Forum in Hamburg. Franco-German public broadcaster ARTE will broadcast a documentary on August 21, and a longer version titled “Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil” will open in cinemas in September. The filmmakers spent years accompanying a Dutch team of experts that had set out to painstakingly study the life and works of Bosch, and it became a witness to the tension in the international community of near-obsessive Bosch specialists.
There are only 25 oil paintings, some in multiple parts, that art historians more or less agree came from Bosch himself. These works hang in European and American museums. There are also a similar number of drawings. Institutions that own one of these rare pieces possess an invaluable treasure. The Prado in Madrid long believed it had six originals, until art historians from the Netherlands attributed three of them to Bosch’s employees or successors. In the film, the experts barely manage to maintain a polite tone when interacting with one another.
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