ISBN: 978-1-78160-596-7

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1. Death of a Miser

HIERONYMUS BOSCH and the LISBON "TEMPTATION": A VIEW from the 3rd MILLENNIUM

In 1951, Wilhelm Fränger's tome, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation, was translated into English. The book created a sensation, both on the scholarly and the popular levels. An article on the book accompanied by color illustrations in Life Magazine probably did more than anything else to popularize Bosch, because there had been little or nothing of the sort published on him at the time. Fränger's interpretation that Bosch did his major altarpieces not for orthodox religious purposes, but for use by quasi-religious cults was being promoted as a turning-point in the understanding of this enigmatic artist.

While most art historians who have taken up Bosch in the years since Fränger's death in 1964 have renounced Fränger's contentions, there are still some who continue to endorse his assertion that the grand master of a cult of Adamites dictated its secret imagery to Bosch which he then revealed in his great painting in the Prado Museum, The Garden of Earthly Delights (p. 26-27), and in several minor paintings.

The writers who commented upon Bosch in the nearly five centuries following his death compounded such a reputation for the man as a "faizeur de diables" (Gossart), that until the modern period he was hardly considered an artist at all.

It was largely his frenzied hell scenes that attracted such attention. When he depicted the creatures and settings of these "hells" in terms of infinitely detailed naturalism, they were so convincing as to seem pure evocation.

To the medieval mind, the man who could reveal so plainly its own worst fears must have been a wizard or a madman, perhaps the tool of the Devil himself. Later writers either reflected this point of view or, following the rationalist aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation, passed Bosch off as representing the worst of Medievalism.

When he was mentioned it was not so much as an artist, but as a freak performer. Eventually Bosch was obscured and forgotten. It took at least two centuries until there was a revival of interest in him, in the late nineteenth century.

2. Cure of Folly, also called The Extraction of the Stone of Folly

3. Anonymous, Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1550.

4. The Conjurer,

5. Ship of Fools,

6. Pieter Jansz Saenredam, Drawing of Bois-le-Duc

The twentieth century saw more emphasis on this man as an artist than at any time in the past and there is continued, almost overwhelming interest in him in the twenty-first century. One would expect Italian writers of the High Renaissance period to point out the painter's strangeness, since his ideation was so antithetical to that of the South.

The Florentine historian Guicciardini, in his Description of all the Low Countries (1567), referred to "Jerome Bosch de Boisleduc, very noble and admirable inventor of fantastic and bizarre things.…" In 1568, the Italian historian of artists, Vasari, called Boschian invention "fantastiche e capricciose."

Lomazzo, the author of the Treatise on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, first published in 1584, spoke of "the Flemish Girolamo Bosch, who in representing strange appearances and frightful and horrid dreams, was singular and truly divine."

During the same period in the North, similar statements were made concerning the painter's work, his demons and hells being mentioned to the exclusion of all else. The Netherlandish historian, Marc van Vaernewijck (1567), called Bosch "the maker of devils, since he had no rival in the art of depicting demons."

Carel van Mander, the Northern counterpart to Vasari, made little more observation of Bosch's entire works than that they were "...gruesome pictures of spooks and horrid phantoms of hell.…" Numerous statements in the same vein began to appear in Spanish writing following the influx of so many of Bosch's paintings into mid-sixteenth-century Spain.