Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch
Born	1450 's-Hertogenbosch
Died	August 1516(1516-08-00) (aged 65–66) 's-Hertogenbosch
Occupations	Painter, draftsman, technical architect specializing in technical design

Cornelis Cort (engraver), portrait of Jheronimus Bosch; print in Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Germaniae Inferioris Effigies, Antwerp, 1572, with a Latin epigram by Dominicus Lampsonius whose translation might read: "What do your astonished eyes see, Jheronimus Bosch? Why that pallor on your face? Have you perhaps seen the ghosts of Lemuria or the flying specters of Erebus appear before you? It would seem that the gates of greedy Pluto and the dwellings of Tartarus have opened for you, seeing how your skillful hand has been able to paint so well all the secrets of Avernus."

Jheronimus van Aken ('s-Hertogenbosch, c. 1450 – 1516), familiarly called Joen and known as Jheronimus Bosch or Hieronymus Bosch, in Spanish el Bosco, was a painter born in the north of the Duchy of Brabant, in the present-day Netherlands, author of a body of work exceptional both for the extraordinary inventiveness of its figurations and the subjects treated and for its technique, within the tradition of Flemish painting to which it belongs.

Bosch did not date any of his paintings, and relatively few bear a signature that can be considered non-apocryphal. What is known of his life and his family comes from the scant references that appear in the municipal archives of 's-Hertogenbosch and, in particular, in the account books of the Confraternity of Our Lady, of which he was a sworn member. Of his artistic activity, only a few minor works, not preserved, are documented, along with the commission for a Last Judgment that Philip the Handsome gave him in 1504. No documentation produced during the painter's lifetime has come down to us for any of the works currently attributed to him, and the characteristics of his singular style have been established solely on the basis of a small number of works mentioned in the literary sources, all of them later than the painter's death and, in some cases, of doubtful reliability, since from very early on Bosch's genuine works were not distinguished from those of his imitators. Bosch became famous even in his lifetime as an inventor of marvelous figures and of images full of fantasy, and followers and forgers soon appeared who would make of his themes and imaginings a veritable artistic genre, also disseminated through tapestries embroidered in Brussels and through prints, many of them signed by Hieronymus Cock.

Philip II, who was one of the first and most distinguished collectors of his works, was able to gather a significant number of them in the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and the Palace of El Pardo. The first critics and interpreters of Bosch's work also emerged in his circle. The Hieronymite Fray José de Sigüenza, historian of the Escorial foundation, summed up the reasons for that preference in the painter's singularity and depth, characteristics that made him different from any other, for, as he said:

the difference that [...] there is between the paintings of this man and those of the others is that the others sought to paint man as he appears from outside; he alone dared to paint him as he is within.

Biography

Anonymous, Cloth Market of 's-Hertogenbosch, c. 1530, oil on panel, 126 × 67 cm, Noordbrabants Museum, 's-Hertogenbosch; the seventh house from the right, after the blue house, called Inden salvatoer, was the residence of Bosch and his wife Aleid van de Meervenne.

Jheronimus van Aken, a member of a family of painters, was born around 1450 in the Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch ("ducal forest"; in somewhat archaic Castilian, Bolduque; in French, Bois-le-Duc), the northern capital of the Duchy of Brabant, in the present-day Netherlands. From 's-Hertogenbosch, commonly called Den Bosch, he took the name with which he would sign some of his works.

With somewhat more than seventeen thousand inhabitants in 1496, 's-Hertogenbosch was the second largest city in the northern Netherlands, behind only Utrecht, and one of the largest cities of the Duchy of Brabant, after Antwerp and Brussels. Bosch's grandfather, Jan van Aken (c. 1380–1454), settled in 's-Hertogenbosch coming from Nijmegen, in the Duchy of Guelders, where his great-grandfather, Thomas van Aken, had acquired citizenship in 1404. If, as is believed, the surname Van Aken corresponds to a toponym of origin, the family must have come from the German city of Aachen (Aachen). Anthonius (c. 1420–1478), Bosch's father, like his three older brothers, was also a painter. It is recorded that in 1461 he received the commission to paint the doors of the altarpiece of the Confraternity of Our Lady in its chapel in the Church of Saint John, which he did not manage to complete. A year later he acquired a house on the eastern side of the Market Square, the house called "In Sint Thoenis," where he set up his workshop, which was damaged in the fire that devastated the city in June 1463. Married to Aleid van der Mynnen, the couple had three sons who were painters: Goessen (c. 1444–1498), Jan or Johannes (c. 1448–1499) and Jheronimus, the youngest, as well as two daughters named Katharina and Herbertke.

There is no certain information about Bosch's early years. The first documentary record dates from April 5, 1474, when, together with his father and his older brothers, he testified on behalf of his sister Katharina in the mortgage of a house. Since he acted together with his father in a second document of July 26 of the same year, it is presumed that on that date he had not yet reached the legal age of twenty-four that would have allowed him to act independently, which has served as the starting point for placing the year of his birth around 1450. His artistic training must have taken place in his father's workshop, where, according to the tax records, after the father's death (1478) the two older brothers continued to reside with their mother, and later also his sister-in-law and nephews, the sons of Goessen: Johannes, painter and sculptor, and Anthonis, painter, who kept the workshop open at least until 1523. Since no documented works attributable to the other members of the Van Aken family are known, it is not possible to know what teaching he received, although it may be supposed that it was that typical of a local, provincial workshop. Only a mural painting of the Calvary with Donors in the choir of the Church of Saint John, painted around 1453 but still Gothic and foreign to the Flemish innovations, has been related to the grandfather, and some details, such as the slender silhouette of the body of Christ, are also found in the Christ Crucified with a Donor (Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Artes de Belgique), painted by Bosch around 1485, while the scale and arrangement of the donors is similar to that which they had in another of Bosch's earliest works, the Ecce Homo in Frankfurt, before they were hidden under overpainting.

The next records date from 1481. On January 3, "Joen the painter" sold to his eldest brother the quarter share that belonged to him of the family house on the Market Square. Months later, on June 5, he appears in a document as the husband of Aleid van de Meervenne, owner of the house called "Inden salvatoer," in which the couple settled, located on the more elite northern side of the same Market Square. Aleid, born in 1453, was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant family with property in houses and land in 's-Hertogenbosch and its surroundings, which were to increase further upon the death in 1484 of her brother Goyart van de Meervenne and, a little later, in 1492, also of her sister Geertrud, who had settled in Tiel. The latter's eldest son, Paulus Wijnants, lived for some time with Bosch and Aleid, who had no children. Although the couple must have signed some kind of prenuptial contract by which Aleid retained her property upon Bosch's death and was able to pass it on to her nephew Paulus, heir to her fief in Oirschot, Bosch acted in some financial transactions on behalf of his wife, and her considerable income allowed him to lead a comfortable life, which has on occasion been related to the freedom he would have enjoyed in choosing his subjects and his artistic direction.

After Bosch: The Wedding at Cana, c. 1560 or later, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The servant who in the middle ground presents a swan on a platter could evoke the Swan banquets organized by the Confraternity of Our Lady, of which Bosch was an active member.

In the year 1486–1487 he joined the Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap (Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Lady), devoted to the cult of the Virgin and governed by a strict religious rule. In 1500 the confraternity had some fifteen thousand external members and a much smaller number of sworn brothers, around sixty, initially only clergy, and a small number of swan brothers, members of the urban elites charged with supplying the birds eaten at the annual banquets the confraternity held around the Christmas festivities. "Jeroen the painter" presumably attended the New Year's banquet of 1488 already as a sworn brother, as was recorded in the minutes of the meeting. Apart from the Swan banquet, the institutional confreres held between eight and ten banquets a year in rotation in the private houses of their members. It fell to Bosch to organize the one held in July 1488, which was attended by the secretary of the King of the Romans, the future Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg. In 1498 he was in charge of the Swan banquet, this time at the brotherhood's headquarters, and on March 10, 1509, he again received the sworn brothers in his house. This was a special meeting, held during Lent, at which only fish was eaten, paid for by Bosch, and fruit and wine provided by the widow of Jan Back, who had been burgomaster of 's-Hertogenbosch, in whose memory the meal was held. After attending a mass in the confraternity's chapel, as the secretary recorded in the account book, the sworn brothers paraded two by two to the house of brother "Jheronimi van Aken the painter who writes himself Jheronimus Bosch."

In May 1498 he signed a power of attorney in favor of the city council so that it could conclude business in his name, which, together with the absence of documentary records for the years immediately following, has been used to support a journey to Venice around 1500 for which there is no proof whatsoever. In fact, documentary gaps are constant in Bosch's biography, but nothing indicates that he was absent from his native city for long stretches of time. As a local chronicler described it, in Bosch's lifetime 's-Hertogenbosch was a "pious and pleasant city." Although ecclesiastically dependent on the Diocese of Liège—until 1560 it had neither a bishop nor a cathedral—at the beginning of the 16th century it had some thirty religious buildings, served in 1526 by 930 religious and 160 beguines. In its vicinity there were also ten other abbeys. Erasmus of Rotterdam himself had studied classical languages there when he was about seventeen, between 1485 and 1487, although his memory of the time he had spent in 's-Hertogenbosch living in a convent of the Brethren of the Common Life was very negative: "time lost," as is read in the Compendium Vitae, perhaps written by Erasmus himself, although almost on his own he had had the opportunity to read some good books.

Moreover, religious institutions were not the only clients painters had. Well-to-do citizens and guilds also commissioned works from artists. Goldsmiths, bell founders and woodcarvers formed powerful artisan groups in the city, as did the guilds of embroiderers and of glaziers, who were responsible for supplying colored stained glass windows to churches and monasteries. Some of Bosch's few documented works are related to them. Thus, in the accounting year 1481–1482, when the Confraternity of Our Lady commissioned a new stained glass window for its chapel from the local glazier Willem Lombart, the contract stipulated that in executing it he was to take as his model the sketch provided by "Joen the painter," for which the latter had been paid a certain sum intended for the linen paper used for the drawing. He also provided models for the embroiderers, as is recorded by a payment noted in the year 1511–1512 for the "sketch of the cross" for a blue brocade chasuble. From the coats of arms displayed on the side panels of the Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi in the Museo del Prado, next to the donors and their patron saints, it is known that the triptych was commissioned from him by Peeter Scheyfve, Dean of the drapers' guild of Antwerp, and his second wife, Agneese de Gramme. High officials and members of the local bourgeoisie, as their coats of arms reveal, were also the patrons of the triptychs of the Ecce Homo (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and of the Lamentations of Job (Bruges, Groeningemuseum), both considered workshop works.

Last Judgment Triptych, central panel, oil on panel, 164 × 127 cm, Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts.

The most important commission received by Bosch for which there is documentary evidence is that of a large Last Judgment, for which in September 1504 he received from the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Handsome thirty-six pounds as an advance. That same winter the Duke and his father, the Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg, visited 's-Hertogenbosch, but there is no record that they gave him other commissions, and it is not even possible to know whether that Last Judgment was finished. Other documented commissions are of a very minor character; thus, for example, in 1487 the Table of the Holy Spirit, a charitable institution, commissioned him to paint "a new cloth in the entrance hall and a stag's horn," and in 1491 the Brotherhood of Our Lady paid him 18 stuivers for enlarging and rewriting the panel with the names of the sworn brothers, the painter having donated as much again of his work.

Bosch died in the first days of August 1516, perhaps as a result of an epidemic, apparently of cholera, that broke out in the city that summer. On the 9th of that month funeral rites were held for the painter in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Church of Saint John, which belonged to the brotherhood, whose brothers, as was customary, bore part of the expenses, carefully noted in the confraternity's account book. In addition to the Dean, the deacon and the subdeacon, officiants of the solemn funeral mass, various sums were received for their participation in the obsequies by the singers, organist, bell ringer, the poor gathered before the chapel, and the gravediggers and pallbearers, as would correspond to a funeral corpore insepulto. The year of death is also confirmed by a list of the deceased brothers of the confraternity, drawn up between 1567 and 1575, in which, among the deaths of the year 1516, it was recorded: "(Obitus fratrum) Aº 1516: Jheronimus Aquen(sis) alias Bosch, insignis pictor." Years later, in 1742, on folio 76 recto of the confraternity's heraldic album, and under an empty blazon—Bosch, as an artisan, lacked a noble coat of arms—a simple legend explained: "Hieronimus Aquens alias Bosch, seer vermaerd Schilder. Obiit 1516" ("Jerome of Aachen, known as Bosch, very famous painter, died in 1516").

Style

The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on panel, 220 × 389 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

"Most admired and marvelous creator of strange and comic images and of singularly outlandish scenes," as the Italian traveler Ludovico Guicciardini wrote in 1567 in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, Bosch placed his satirical vein at the service of a moral discourse grounded in the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, with frequent allusions to sin, the transience of life and the folly of the man who does not follow the example of the saints in his "imitation of Christ," as the Brethren of the Common Life, very influential in Bosch's milieu, taught, without this implying a transposition into images of the texts of Geert Grote or Thomas à Kempis.

Bosch's painting falls ambiguously within the Flemish tradition, from which at the same time it subtly departs in imagery and technique. Karel van Mander, fascinated by his painting, already observed that he used layers of paint so thin that he often let the grounds show through. In some respects his technique lacked the refinement typical of the Dutch primitives. But that new technique, which was moreover not exclusive to Bosch, allowed the painter to work faster, since the thin layers of color dried sooner, and at lower cost. On a chalk-white ground applied to the support, Bosch drew with a brush and a dark material with some charcoal in its composition. Infrared reflectography makes it possible to study the underdrawing, which, broadly speaking, can be grouped into two types. The first group is formed by works that start from schematic drawings with hardly any modeling, in which only the main lines and the folds of the garments are indicated. In these, changes to the initial idea are made in the phase of applying color, an example of which is the Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos in Berlin. A second, less numerous group, to which belong the panels of the dismantled triptych of the Path of Life (The Ship of Fools in Paris, the Allegory of Intemperance in New Haven, Death and the Miser in Washington and The Peddler in Rotterdam) and the Table of the Deadly Sins (Museo del Prado), present a more finished drawing, modeled with long strokes that are parallel in some areas. After the drawing, sometimes executed in several phases, he applied the color in very thin layers, often only one. Finally, with precise touches and a fine brush, he picked out details and highlights.

The principal novelty of Bosch's painting, the "new path" that, according to Fray José de Sigüenza, he chose to take, lies in the use of burlesque and jocular elements, "placing in the midst of those jests many refinements and oddities." Nevertheless, neither the introduction of moral concepts by means of satire nor the creation of fantastic images were truly absolute novelties. Some iconic sources in engravings and drôleries have been pointed out to explain minor details of his figurations. One of those iconographic sources may be the one used for the giraffe that appears in the paradise panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (Museo del Prado), taken from the same prototype that served to illustrate the Italian manuscript of Cyriacus of Ancona's journey to Egypt, written in 1443. Also in The Garden of Earthly Delights, the presence behind the figure of Adam of a Canary dragon tree has been noted, which Bosch could have taken from an engraving of the Flight into Egypt by Martin Schongauer; moreover, in the monochrome figure of God the Father painted on the outer doors of the same triptych, the possible influence has been seen of a woodcut by Michael Wolgemut for the Liber chronicarum of Hartmann Schedel, published in Nuremberg in 1493, which would establish a terminus post quem for its painting. Dendrochronological dating of the panel, however, would allow that date to be moved back to 1480 or even earlier, making the Garden triptych one of Bosch's earliest works, when it had traditionally been believed, on the contrary, to belong to his last period, which illustrates the enormous difficulties that arise when trying to order Bosch's work chronologically. In short, Bosch's radical originality lies not so much in the creation of fantastic images as in having taken up a tradition belonging to the marginal arts and applied it to panel painting, characteristic of altarpieces.

The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot, oil on oak panel, 73 × 52.5 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

Interest in landscape is also a characteristic common to his entire output, as it is of Jan van Eyck. A work such as the Adoration of the Magi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York can demonstrate this. Consistently dated around 1475, among the painter's first works, the panel was branded a pastiche by Charles de Tolnay precisely because he found incoherent the abundance of gold and the fitting of the archaic figures into a landscape of very modern conception, typical of the most advanced period. It is this importance of landscape in Bosch's work that has led Bernard Vermet to propose a chronological ordering of Bosch's output based on its evolution. At the extremes would be, on the one hand, the "flat, perspectiveless" landscape with "stock little trees" of The Garden of Earthly Delights and, on the other, the "exquisitely modern" landscapes of the Haywain (Museo del Prado) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. Considering the modernity of the landscape—and the Renaissance conception of the table leg—The Extraction of the Stone of Madness could not be placed among the painter's early works either, as has usually been considered, although, as Vermet also admits, moving the painting of The Garden of Earthly Delights to an early date, around 1480, is equivalent to supposing a remarkable precocity in the painter. Landscape plays a prominent role in The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot in the Museo del Prado, which seems to have undergone some changes since its original conception, when the treetops were less leafy and the sky was more developed. The raising of the horizon line diminishes the figure of the saint and anticipates what Joachim Patinir would do some years later. Dendrochronological dating of the panel indicates, nonetheless, that it could have been used as early as 1464, like the panels of The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the pictorial technique based on very light layers of color is characteristic of Bosch, although its authorship has been questioned.

Work

The gaps in the documentation mean that no work can be attributed to Bosch with absolute certainty. A certain consensus has nevertheless been reached in attributing to him between twenty-five and thirty paintings, taking as a starting point what the written sources consistently attribute to him: the creation of a world of fantastic beings and infernal scenes. But the early success of those scenes, turned into a genre by copyists and imitators, together with the absence of data on how the workshop operated, makes it difficult to distinguish autograph works from what are workshop replicas or copies, perhaps, of lost originals. The posthumous fame of Jheronimus Bosch spread, more than in his native city, where none of his works is preserved, through the southern Netherlands, Italy and, above all, Spain, where already in the collection of Queen Isabella the Catholic there was a painting of the Magdalene or of Mary of Egypt attributed to him. Described in the post mortem inventory of 1505 as "another smaller panel [...] which has in the middle a naked woman with long hair, her hands joined, and below on the gilded frame an inscription with letters that says jeronimus," it could have been a gift from Joanna I of Castile, daughter of Isabella and wife of Philip the Handsome, to her sister Isabella of Aragon. It was also in Spain that two of the first critics and interpreters of his works flourished, who provided interesting information about them: Felipe de Guevara and Fray José de Sigüenza.

Felipe de Guevara, owner of several works by Bosch possibly inherited from his father, Diego de Guevara, who had been Lord High Steward to Philip the Handsome, wrote around 1560 some Comentarios de la pintura addressed to Philip II. In them, discussing Bosch's creations, which he included in the genre of what he called "ethical" paintings, which "show the customs and affections of the minds of men," he railed against the numerous copyists and forgers who had sprung up in Flanders, lacking his prudence and decorum and with no more ingenuity than knowing how to age their paintings in the smoke of chimneys to pass them off as old, so that those falsely signed with his name were by then infinite, as he said:

Table of the Deadly Sins, oil on poplar panel, 119.5 × 139.5 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

... And since Hieronymus Bosch has come before us, it will be right to undeceive the common people, and others more than common, of an error they have conceived about his paintings, which is that whatever monstrosity and thing outside the order of nature they see, they at once attribute to Hieronymus Bosch, making him an inventor of monsters and chimeras. I do not deny that he painted strange effigies of things, but only for one purpose, which was in treating of hell, in which matter, wishing to depict devils, he imagined compositions of remarkable things.
What Hieronymus Bosch did with prudence and decorum, others have done and do without any discretion or judgment; for having seen in Flanders how well received that kind of painting by Hieronymus Bosch was, they resolved to imitate him, painting monsters and deranged imaginings, giving it to be understood that in this alone consisted the imitation of Bosch.
Thus the paintings of this kind come to be infinite, sealed with the name of Hieronymus Bosch, falsely inscribed; on which it never crossed his mind to lay his hands, but rather smoke and short wits, smoking them in chimneys to give them greater authority and antiquity.

Guevara nevertheless, alluding to Bosch's nervous and unfinished technique, singled out one of those followers, better than all the rest, who signed with the master's name and imitated him in everything except in the patient finish:

...but it is fair to give notice that among these imitators of Hieronymus Bosch there is one who was his disciple, who, out of devotion to his master, or to lend credit to his works, inscribed on his paintings the name of Bosch, and not his own. This being so, they are paintings much to be esteemed, and whoever has them should hold them in high regard, because in the inventions and moralities he followed in his master's footsteps, and in the workmanship he was more diligent and patient than Bosch, not departing from the air and elegance, and from the coloring of his master. An example of this kind of painting is a table that Your Majesty [Philip II] has, on which the seven deadly sins are painted in a circle, shown in figures and examples...

Haywain Triptych, c. 1512–1515; oil on oak panels, 133 × 100 cm the central panel, 136.1 × 47.6 cm each of the side panels, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

Shortly after the death of Felipe de Guevara (1563), King Philip II offered his widow and his son Ladrón de Guevara, heir to the mayorazgo, to purchase some houses and plots in Madrid, next to the Puerta de la Vega, and several paintings from his collection, all of it valued at 14,000 ducats or 5,250,000 maravedís. Among the paintings that interested the King were various canvases with mythological subjects without the author's name, four panels with landscapes by Joachim Patinir and "A panel one vara and two thirds high, with two doors, which when fully opened is three varas wide, and it is the Haywain, by Gerónimo Bosco, by his own hand." The lot also included five other canvases attributed to Bosch:

- A canvas three varas wide and one vara and a third high, which is Two Blind Men, one leading the other, and behind them a blind woman.
- Another canvas two varas wide and one high, which is a Dance in the Flemish manner.
- Another canvas one vara and two thirds wide and one vara and a third high which/is/Some Blind Men go hunting a wild boar.
- Another canvas of a Witch, one vara and a third long and one vara high.
- Another square canvas, Where Madness is cured; yet to be framed, because all the others are framed.

The Haywain Triptych was again described at length in the inventory of the first delivery of artworks to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in 1574:

A painted panel with two doors, on which is painted with the brush a Haywain from which all the estates take, which denotes the vanity they pursue; and above the hay a figure of the guardian angel and the devil and other figures; and at the top of the panel God the Father; and on the right-hand panel the creation of Adam and other figures of the same story; and on the left-hand one Hell and the punishments of the deadly sins; which is five feet high and four wide, without the doors: it is by Gerónimo Bosqui.

Christ Carrying the Cross, 1505–1507; oil on oak panel, 142.3 × 104.5 cm, Patrimonio Nacional, Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

This Haywain of Guevara's was the second to enter the royal collection, which already possessed another example cited by Ambrosio de Morales. It is probable that Guevara's example is the one still preserved in El Escorial, ostentatiously signed on the right panel and, despite what is stated in the inventory, a copy of the original version, the one currently kept in the Museo del Prado. However, the dendrochronological dating of the Escorial example, between 1498 and 1504 as the earliest dates at which the wood could have been used—1510–1516 for the Prado version—together with the quality of its execution and other minor details, such as the jug on the table at which the monk is seated in the central panel, which in the autograph version was left uncolored, indicate that it could be a replica made in Bosch's own workshop and not a late copy.

Other works assigned to Bosch in the document of the first delivery of works to the monastery of El Escorial were three versions of the Temptations of Saint Anthony, of which only the version now preserved in the Museo del Prado, with a semicircular top, has been identified; the triptych of the Adoration of the Magi (Museo del Prado), which was placed in the lower prior's cell; the Table of the Deadly Sins (Museo del Prado), kept in Philip II's apartments; and the Road to Calvary or Christ Carrying the Cross (Monastery of El Escorial), intended for the vicarial chapter house, a work considered to be securely autograph after some doubts had been expressed, and of which another version is known, broader and more crowded, though with smaller figures, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The canvases described among the Guevara property acquired by the Crown have not been located, but their subjects indicate the genre of painting, between satire and social criticism, with which Bosch's painting was associated. Well known is the subject of the Extraction of the Stone of Madness, an illustration of the incurability of human stupidity. Described again in the 1600 inventory of the old Alcázar of Madrid as "A canvas by the hand of Hierónimo Bosco, damaged, painted in tempera, in which there is a surujano [sic, for cirujano, surgeon] who is curing a man's head," it cannot be the panel now in the Museo del Prado, which apparently belonged, before 1529, to Bishop Philip of Burgundy. The popularity of the subject, also very present in Dutch literature as an emblem of folly, is illustrated by the abundance of versions and replicas directly or indirectly related to Boschian models.

Two Blind Men, One Leading the Other, an illustration of the Gospel parable (Matthew 15:14: "and if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch"), belongs, together with the Extraction of the Stone of Madness, to the same genre that Paul Vandenbroeck has called "literature of folly." The original being lost, Bosch's composition can presumably be known through an engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bosch. Intellectual rather than physical blindness, represented in the print by two vagabond musicians with the staffs of pilgrims to Santiago, thus appears associated with begging and rootlessness, which for Bosch, an interpreter of the nascent Dutch bourgeoisie, which identified wisdom with virtue, amounted to the display—and condemnation—of vicious, ethically reprehensible behavior. It is the same mode of expression, by means of an inverse symbolization, that is found in The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, another commonplace of the literature of folly illustrated by Bosch in one of the panels of the dismantled Triptych of the Path of Life (Paris, Musée du Louvre).

Blind Men Hunting a Boar

Jan Verbeeck, pen and brown ink drawing, 19.5 x 28.3 cm, Paris, École des Beaux-Arts.

Master of the Villafañe, monochrome mural painting (118 x 159 cm) in a room of the Villafañe palace, Segovia.

The blind, objects of cruel entertainment, were again the protagonists of the canvas described as Some Blind Men Go Hunting a Wild Boar. In this case Bosch's original has also been lost, although its composition can be recognized in a drawing by Jan Verbeeck, a painter from Mechelen, preserved in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Knowledge in Spain of the composition drawn by Verbeeck is well attested by the existence of a copy of the same model painted in grisaille on one of the walls of a hidalgo house located in the Plaza de San Facundo in Segovia, which belonged to Ana de Miramontes y Zuazola, wife of Jerónimo de Villafañe, warden of the Royal Alcázares in 1565. The pastime, known as "clubbing the pig," associated with the feast of Saint Martin, is also represented in another lost composition by Bosch, known only through Saint Martin and the Poor, one of the tapestries of the series called Disparates del Bosco (Bosch's Follies), originally embroidered for the King of France Francis I (Patrimonio Nacional, Monastery of El Escorial).

In his Descripción del bosque y Casa Real del Prado (1582), Gonzalo Argote de Molina noted the presence in that Royal Site of eight panels by Bosch, "a painter from Flanders, famous for the follies of his painting," among them some Temptations of Saint Anthony and the painting of a "strange boy" born in Germany who three days after his birth looked seven years old, "who, aided by a most ugly build and countenance, is a figure of great wonder." In 1593 new paintings by Bosch entered the monastery of El Escorial, the most important of them The Garden of Earthly Delights, now on deposit in the Museo del Prado, which the delivery document described as "a painting on panel in oil, with two doors, of the variety of the world, encoded with various follies by Hierónimo Bosco, which they call Of the Strawberry Tree [Del Madroño]," after one of the fruits that appear in it. Along with the celebrated triptych, there arrived at the monastery a new Temptations of Saint Anthony, a Judgment Encoded in Follies and Various Follies by Hieronymus Bosch, not identified, as well as the Crowning with Thorns with Five Tormentors, acquired together with The Garden of Earthly Delights at the auction of Fernando de Toledo, natural son of the Grand Duke of Alba. With good reason Fray José de Sigüenza could write in his history of the foundation of the monastery of El Escorial, published in 1605 as part of his Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, that "among the paintings of these Germans and Flemings, which, as I say, are many, there are distributed throughout the whole House many by one Jerónimo Bosco."

Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi, oil on panel, 138 × 138 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

Rejecting the common opinion, which finds in Bosch's painting only capricious extravagances, Father Sigüenza classified his paintings, genuine "books of prudence and artifice," into three genres: devotional paintings, with motifs taken from the life of Jesus, such as the subjects of the Adoration of the Magi and Christ Carrying the Cross, where "no monstrosity or folly is seen," but rather the humble spirit of the wise men of the East and the rabid envy of the Pharisees contrasted with the innocence shown in the face of Christ; a second group of paintings that act as mirrors for the Christian, formed by the various versions of the Temptations of Saint Anthony, which gave Bosch occasion "to discover strange effects" by representing the saint with a serene and contemplative face, "his soul full of peace," among fantastic and monstrous beings, "and all this to show that a soul, aided by divine grace (...) even though in the imagination and before the outer and inner eyes the enemy represents what may move to laughter or vain delight, or anger and other disordered passions, they will not be able to overthrow him or move him from his purpose"; a group to which the Table of the Deadly Sins also belonged, with the sacraments painted in the corners as remedies for sin, although what is represented there is in fact the Last Things; and, lastly, a group of paintings of more macaronic appearance, but "of the greatest ingenuity, and of no lesser profit," to which belonged the triptychs of the Haywain, based on Isaiah 40:6: All flesh is hay, and all its glory as the flower of the field, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, whose center is a strawberry or madroñuelo, "which in some parts they call mayotas, a thing that is hardly tasted when it is finished." Fray José de Sigüenza's interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, more than two centuries before the triptych began to be known by that name, is certainly the first, and still fully valid, of the interpretations that have been given for a work considered one of the most enigmatic in the history of painting. Ignorance of the circumstances in which the commission took place and the dates of its execution, as well as of the identity of the client and its original destination, hinders the understanding of images presumed to be symbolic. It has been thought that it may have been commissioned around 1495 by Henry III of Nassau or, more probably, by his uncle, Engelbrecht II, councilor of Duke Philip the Handsome, for his Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, since it was there that Antonio de Beatis, secretary of Cardinal Luis of Aragon, would have seen it on July 30, 1517, during his visit to the Netherlands. The description De Beatis left of the Garden, if it was indeed that work, is in any case rather imprecise and as if made from memory, giving priority to the playful character of what was represented, for what he said he had seen during his tour, without naming its author and among mythological "bellisime picture," were:

some paintings [tavole] of diverse and extravagant things, which represent seas, skies, woods, fields and many other things, some coming out of a sea mussel, others being defecated by cranes, white and black women and men in various actions and postures, birds and animals of all kinds and with great naturalness, things so pleasant and fantastic that it is not possible to describe them to those who have no knowledge of them.

In May 1568 the Garden was confiscated by the Duke of Alba from William of Orange, a descendant of the Nassaus and leader of the Protestant rebellion of the Netherlands. This may explain Fray José de Sigüenza's defense of its orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that was only later called into question by Wilhelm Fraenger, who made Bosch an adept of the sect of the Adamites, and by some other advocates of "alternative" approaches, to whom criticism has given little credibility.

The connection of the Nassaus with Bosch's painting is also confirmed through Mencía de Mendoza (1508–1554), Marchioness of Zenete and third wife of Henry III of Nassau. A rich and cultured woman, close to Erasmianism, at fifteen she was married to Henry of Nassau, with whom she lived in Flanders between 1530 and 1533 and between 1535 and 1539. In her palace in Breda worked, among others, Jan Gossaert and Bernard van Orley, who in 1532 painted a complete gallery of portraits commissioned by Doña Mencía. Widowed, in 1541 she married for the second time, the Duke of Calabria, and settled with him in Valencia, from where she kept in contact with Flanders through Gylles de Brusleyden, founder of the Trilingual College of Leuven, who was also her artistic adviser, and Juan Luis Vives. Doña Mencía assembled an important collection of works of art, among which the tapestries stood out, but also a good number of paintings, many of them sold at public auction in Valencia six years after her death. Three of them, according to the inventory drawn up in 1548, were attributed to "Jerónimo Bosque":

item another painting by jerónimo bosque of an old man and an old woman with a wooden frame all around, the old man with a basket of eggs in his hand/ it is on canvas
item another painting by jerónimo bosque of the tower of babylon, its height is/ it is on canvas
item another painting by jerónimo bosque of saint john the evangelist, he has a chalice in his hand, it is one vara and three palms high and one vara and one palm wide/ it is on canvas

In her funerary chapel in the former Convent of Santo Domingo, for which she had commissioned a series of eight tapestries called of the Deaths on designs by Van Orley, her heir, Luis de Requesens, had the Triptych with Scenes of the Passion of Christ, or of the Improperia, placed, with the Crowning with Thorns on the central panel, a work by a disciple or follower of Bosch (Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia).

Christ Carrying the Cross, oil on panel, 76.8 × 83.1 cm, Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

Just one year before the publication of Sigüenza's Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo, the life of Ieronimus Bos written by Karel van Mander came to light, included with the other lives of Italian and Flemish painters in his Schilder-boeck. Van Mander, who acknowledged not knowing the dates of Bosch's birth and death but considered him truly old, offered an accurate description of his technique, notably different from that practiced by his contemporaries in its use of light and transparent paints applied, as he explained, in compact patches and "often with the first brushstroke of oil, which did not prevent his works from being very beautiful." As for the subjects treated, he cited the verses of Dominicus Lampsonius and dwelt on the presence in his painting of "specters and infernal monsters whose contemplation turns out to be far more terrifying than pleasant." However, with what is currently known of Bosch's painting, it is not possible to know which of his pictures Van Mander actually saw. Neither the Flight into Egypt with a dancing bear, which he apparently saw in Amsterdam, nor the Holy Monk Disputing with the Heretics, which was in the house of a collector in Haarlem, presumably the "trial by fire" with Saint Dominic de Guzmán confronting the Albigensian preachers, nor the Hell with Christ's descent into Limbo, can be related to any of the works now known, and the Christ Carrying the Cross in which "a more serious painter than is usual in him is presented to us" is a subject repeated both in Bosch's output (El Escorial, Vienna) and in that of his followers (Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten).

Saint John the Baptist in Meditation, oil on oak panel, 48 × 40 cm, Madrid, Lázaro Galdiano Museum.

Late descriptions of the interior of the Church of Saint John in 's-Hertogenbosch, with its many altarpieces "worthy of being compared with the sculpture of Praxiteles and the painting of Apelles," suggest that some of them may have been painted by Bosch, although the surviving documentation mentions only his father, Anthonius, and his eldest brother, Goossen, and only in connection with the unfinished high altar. In 1548 the then Prince Philip II visited the church. The chronicler of the felicísimo viaje (most happy journey), Juan Calvete de Estrella, relates that there the Prince admired its forty altars, but he describes only a clock that had, next to an Adoration of the Magi, a Last Judgment, with a heaven and a hell "which is a thing of wonder and instills religion and fear in the soul." If on that occasion no work by Bosch was mentioned, before the city was occupied by the Dutch Protestants in 1629, a local chronicle said of the altars of the choir and of the chapel of the Brotherhood of Our Lady that they were adorned "with scenes made according to the extraordinary art of Hyeronimus Bosch." What was painted on the first of the two altars cited was the creation of the world in six days, according to Koldeweij possibly a copy of the Prado's Garden of Earthly Delights, and on the wings of the second Abigail with David, and Bathsheba and Solomon, which in reality seem to have been painted between 1522 and 1523 by Gielis Panhedel, a painter from Brussels. In addition, the doors of the altarpiece of Saint Michael, with the stories of Esther and Judith, could also be by Bosch, according to the aforementioned chronicle, along with an Adoration of the Kings in the chapel of the miraculous image. The efforts made to identify some of these paintings have not been conclusive. The most elaborate attempt to relate some of the works currently preserved to those mentioned in the Church of Saint John is the interpretation formulated by Jos Koldeweij of the original composition of the brotherhood's high altarpiece. According to that interpretation, and although the documentation does not mention its subjects, that altarpiece would have included the Saint John the Baptist in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and the Saint John on Patmos in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the inner faces of the doors of a case with sculptures that would have been located in the upper tier or attic of the sculpted altarpiece. The thesis, accepted by the members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP), has been vigorously contested by Stephan Kemperdick, curator of the Berlin museum, for chronological reasons—the Berlin panel could not have been painted before 1495—and iconographic ones. The reverse, painted with scenes of the Passion in false grisaille within a translucent sphere, in the manner of a terrestrial globe, similarly to what is found on the outer doors of The Garden of Earthly Delights but, unlike these, with the complete sphere on a single panel, makes a second similar sphere improbable on the reverse of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum panel, on which, moreover, there are no signs of its ever having been painted.

The presence of works by Bosch in Italy—two triptychs and a polyptych, all in Venice—is very old, but the written testimonies they have left are extremely scarce. Connected with the painter's hypothetical journey to Italy, some of them may have been in the possession of Cardinal Domenico Grimani as early as 1521, when the humanist Marcantonio Michiel visited his valuable collection. Among other Flemish paintings that he described in his Notizia d'opere di disegno, Michiel found interesting, for the smooth handling of their oil painting, three works attributed to Ieronimo Bosch: "La tela dell'Inferno, con la gran diversità de monstri," the "tela delli Sogni" and that of Fortune with the whale that swallowed Jonah.

Saint Wilgefortis Triptych, oil on oak panel, Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia.

Even though Michiel spoke of canvases and not of panels, the first two—Dream and Hell—have been related to the four panels with chimeras and scenes of witchcraft cited by Antonio Maria Zanetti in his Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della cità di Venezia of 1733, located in the passage to the Council chamber of the Palazzo Ducale, although Zanetti attributed them to Civetta, as Herri met de Bles was known in Italy. These, in turn, are identified with the four shutters now known as Visions of the Hereafter: The Earthly Paradise, The Ascent to the Empyrean, The Fall of the Damned and Hell (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia, on deposit in the Palazzo Grimani). Zanetti is also responsible for the first record of the Triptych of the Hermit Saints, located in 1733, like Bosch's other Venetian works, in a corridor of the Doges' palace. With it was the Saint Wilgefortis Triptych (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia), to which Marco Boschini had already alluded in Le ricche minere della pittvra veneziana, 1664, as the martyrdom of a female saint on the cross with many figures, dwelling in particular on a fainting figure at the foot of the cross, which he attributed to a certain Girolamo Basi. The identification of the crucified martyr with Saint Wilgefortis, who according to legend grew a beard, is supported by Zanetti's doubts; in 1733 he doubly corrected Boschini by maintaining that it was a crowned male saint, not a female saint, and that it was not by Girolamo Basi but by "Girolamo Bolch, come vedesi scritto in lettere Tedeschi bianche," only to correct himself again in the second edition of his guide of 1771, when he understood that what was represented was "la crocefissione d'un Santo o Santa martire."

The Last Judgment Triptych in Bruges may also have come from Venice; it was presumably located in 1845 in the collection assembled at Raixa (Majorca) by Cardinal Despuig, a collection formed largely in Italy. Auctioned by his heirs in Paris in 1900, the triptych was disassembled, with its side doors joined in a single panel, according to the Noticia histórico-artística de los Museos del eminentísimo señor cardenal Despuig existentes en Mallorca by Joaquín María Rover, where the panels titled Hell and Hell and the World, attributed to "Bosch," were listed under numbers 111 and 123; of him Rover said that, "although of Majorcan surname, he was born in Bois-le-Duc, in Holland, in the middle of the 15th century: he spent a large part of his life in Spain, where it is believed he died." Some details of the description provided by Joaquín María Rover, such as the "original ship of mysterious shape, on whose prow some angels in a row, their wingtips mingling, play long trumpets," as seen on the left door of the Bruges triptych, would make it possible to confirm that provenance, as would the presence of Boschian elements taken from this triptych in the work of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, active in Venice from 1521.

In Portugal the first records of works by Bosch appear in connection with the humanist Damião de Goes and his Inquisition trial. At just over twenty years of age, in 1523, he arrived in Flanders as a clerk of the Portuguese trading factory and met Erasmus, who in 1534 hosted him in his house in Freiburg for four months. Settled in Antwerp, he traveled through northern Europe on a commission from the Portuguese Crown, and in 1531 he met Luther and Melanchthon in Wittenberg. He studied at the universities of Santiago de Compostela, Padua and Leuven, where in 1542 he was taken prisoner by the French, who were attacking the city, and freed through the mediation of King John III of Portugal. He returned to Portugal in 1545, and in September of that same year, in Évora, he was denounced before the tribunal of the Inquisition by Simão Rodrigues, one of the founders of the Society of Jesus, whom he had met in Padua. However, it would not be until 1571 that he was arrested and tried, being condemned on December 16, 1572, for having sought a meeting with Luther and Melanchthon and, as a Lutheran, for having doubted the value of indulgences and of auricular confession, although he later repented of it.

In his defense, ten months after his arrest, with protestations of being a good Catholic, Goes presented to the inquisitors a paper in which he recalled some things he had given to the churches of the kingdom from 1526 onward, and among them, emphasizing its high price but also the novelty of its invention, he cited "um painel em que está pintada a coroaçao de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo, peça que vale muito dinheiro, pela perfeição, novidade e invenção da obra, feita por Hieronimo Bosch," which he had donated to the Church of Our Lady of Várzea in Alenquer, where he wished to be buried, to which he had also given a valuable triptych with the Crucifixion that he attributed to Quentin Massys.

Triptych of the Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot, oil on oak panel, 131.5 × 111.9 cm the central panel, 131.5 × 53 each of the side panels, Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.

When, however, on May 30 the prosecutor said he had new evidence that would demonstrate the defendant's lack of veneration for sacred images, he protested that he was very devoted to them, that he had many of them in his study, and that the monarchs themselves had gone to see them, besides which he had also given two altarpieces to the Queen, Joanna of Austria; to this he added, in the defense memorial he presented on June 16, two other panels, one of the temptations of Job and another with the temptations of Saint Anthony, which he had given to the "nuncio Monte Polusano," later Cardinal Giovanni Ricci de Montepulciano, nuncio in Portugal from 1545 to 1550, "que me custaran perto de duzentos cruzados, pintados da mão do grande Jerónimo Bosque, as quais me mandou cometer por João Lousado e João Quinoso que lhe vendesse. E eu lhos mandei em presente." Both the Crowning with Thorns (London, National Gallery, and El Escorial) and the Temptations of Job (Bruges, Groeningemuseum) are well-known subjects in the output of Bosch and his followers, although the trail of the panels that belonged to Goes has been lost and they could not be directly related to any of those preserved. Likewise, it does not seem possible to identify the panel of the Temptations of Saint Anthony given to the Nuncio of Rome with the triptych now preserved in the Museu de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, one of the most copied and imitated pieces of Bosch's output, of which, however, there are no records earlier than 1882, when Carl Justi was able to see it in the Ajuda Palace, in the collection of Luís I, from which it passed to the Necessidades Palace, residence of Carlos I, and, after the proclamation of the Republic, to the Lisbon museum, which it entered in 1913.

Interpretations

Follower of Bosch: The Vision of Tundal, oil on panel, 54 x 72 cm, Madrid, Lázaro Galdiano Museum.

Like Guicciardini or Lampsonius, Marcus van Vaernewijck, author of a history of Ghent, regarded Bosch as a "creator of demons." It is precisely this aspect of his painting that focused the interest of his copyists and followers. They popularized and vulgarized the infernal scenes inhabited by the extravagant figures that from the very first were associated with Bosch's work, as Felipe de Guevara noted, although Bosch himself—so he said—never made those monstrous figures without purpose and restraint. Francisco Pacheco did not see it that way; in El arte de la pintura, whose first edition dates from 1649, even though he was aware of Philip II's taste, he corrected Father Sigüenza's enthusiasm for the Fleming's work. For Velázquez's master, painters should concern themselves mainly with "the greater and more difficult things, which are the figures," and avoid amusements, always despised by the great masters but sought out by Bosch,

with the variety of stews he made of the demons, whose invention pleased our King Philip II, as shown by the great quantity of this kind that he gathered; but, in my view, Father Fray Josefe de Cigüenza honors him too much by making mysteries of those licentious fantasies, to which we do not invite Painters.

Another Baroque theorist and, like Pacheco, himself a painter, Jusepe Martínez, in his later Discursos practicables del arte de la pintura, maintained that Bosch, whom he considered a native of Toledo though trained in Flanders, had earned "great admiration" for his singular manner of painting the torments of hell and other extravagances laden with morality, "and many agree that our Don Francisco Quevedo, in his Dreams, made use of the paintings of this ingenious man." References to Bosch are frequent in Spanish Golden Age literature. Remembered as a painter of infernal scenes and ugly monsters, without delving into his morality and often in comic situations, he is cited, among others, in the verses of Alonso de Castillo Solórzano and Lope de Vega or in the prose of Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo and Baltasar Gracián. Francisco de Quevedo also recalls the Flemish painter, though with a different intention; among other insults, he called Góngora "the Bosch of poets." What he meant by this is explained by another allusion to the painter found in El alguacil endemoniado, precisely one of those Dreams that Jusepe Martínez considered inspired by Bosch's paintings. Giving the floor to a devil, Quevedo wrote in it:

But leaving this aside, I want to tell you that we are much offended by the potages you make of us, painting us with claws without our being birds; with tails, there being tailless devils; with horns, without our being married; and always badly bearded, there being devils among us who could be hermits and corregidores. Remedy this, for not long ago Jerónimo Bosco went down there, and when asked why he had made so many stews of us in his dreams, he said it was because he had never believed there really were demons.

Since Bosch's extravagant devils, despite Lampsonius and Karel van Mander, once vulgarized and popularized, cause not terror but mockery, the fault, Quevedo would say, lies in the painter's irreligiousness. It was not only the Lord of La Torre de Juan Abad who thought so. The same argument was used, but now against him, in El tribunal de la justa venganza, a not very ingenious diatribe against Quevedo attributed to Luis Pacheco de Narváez, to accuse the satirical poet of the same fault, alleging that he had imagined his devils under the influence of the atheist Jerónimo Bosco:

He makes some demons badly bearded; others grizzled, beardless, left-handed, hunchbacked, snub-nosed, bald, mulatto, bow-legged, lame and with chilblains... the judges... said that Don Francisco de Quevedo seemed to be an apprentice or second part of the atheist and painter Jerónimo Bosque, because all that the latter executed with the brush, mocking those who said there were demons (...) the said Don Francisco had copied with the pen; and that whether it was with the same intent as the other in doubting the immortality of the soul, they held it as a suspicion, although they did not affirm it.

Ecce Homo, oil on oak panel, 71.1 x 60.5 cm, Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum.

At the end of the 19th century there was a revival of interest in Bosch's work. The first monograph devoted to the painter, by Maurice Gossart, dates from 1907 and is titled, significantly, «Jeröme Bosch: Le "faizeur de Dyables" de Bois-le-Duc». The growing interest in psychology, together with the development of psychoanalysis and Surrealism, spurred studies on Bosch's work, though focusing on the explanation of his world of visionary and mysterious images. As if his works were laden with hidden signs, attempts were made to decipher them by seeking in them astrological or alchemical symbols, if not the heretical messages of some obscure sect. The formulations that had the greatest repercussion in this vein were those of Wilhelm Fraenger. His theses, published in 1947, the first to study Bosch's personality and work from the perspective of the heresiarch, are nevertheless described in the most current studies as "extravagant." The problem common to all these highly speculative hypotheses, which showed little interest in distinguishing Bosch's work from that of his imitators, as Nils Büttner has pointed out, is the "lack of attention to the historical perspective [which] has resulted in the existing sources frequently being ignored."

Greater attention to the scant data provided by the documents, such as his well-known membership in the Confraternity of Our Lady as a sworn member, which implied a certain approximation to ecclesiastical status—sworn members were required to have the tonsure, and on special feast days they took part in religious ceremonies wearing copes in the liturgical colors—his closeness to the urban elites, to which he belonged through his marriage, and what is known of his clientele, together with the perspective afforded by an overall view of his painting, such as the one set out by Fray José de Sigüenza, in which again and again he admonishes the viewer against sin with promises of redemption, have led, according to Eric de Bruyn, most recent studies to consider the painter, taking up Sigüenza's explanations once more, as "a religious and satirical moralist whose works express a traditional Christian point of view."

Cataloguing

The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, oil on oak panel, 49 × 34.5 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

The members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) catalogue as autograph twenty-one paintings on panel and twenty drawings. In addition, they analyze four works they consider to be from the workshop, understood in a broad sense, seven they attribute to the painter's followers, and two more (The Extraction of the Stone of Madness and Table of the Deadly Sins, both in the Museo del Prado) about which doubts persist as to whether to assign them to the workshop or to unspecified followers of the master. Their arrangement of the autograph paintings is not chronological but iconographic, grouped in four blocks: Saints, Life of Jesus, Last Judgment (Bruges, Vienna and the Visions of the Hereafter in Venice) and Moralities, which comprise the dismembered triptych of the Path of Life or of the Peddler and the Prado triptychs of the Haywain and The Garden of Earthly Delights. The catalogue by Stefan Fischer, arranged chronologically, adds to the autograph works the Table of the Deadly Sins, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, and the four poorly preserved panels of a triptych with the Great Flood (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), which the members of the BRCP regard as a workshop work. Conversely, he does not consider the Last Judgment triptych in Bruges, Groeningenmuseum, to be by Bosch's hand, attributing it to the workshop or to a former collaborator of Bosch, perhaps, as he calls him, his principal disciple, and he does not take into consideration the fragment of the Temptations of Saint Anthony in Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, securely autograph for the members of the BRCP, who thereby revived an old attribution. The Museo del Prado, for its part, after studies carried out in the museum's own laboratory and its Technical Department, maintains the autograph status of the controversial Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot along with The Extraction of the Stone of Madness and the Table of the Deadly Sins, all three from its collection; and in the catalogue of the 5th centenary exhibition, it includes as works by Bosch's hand, in agreement with the BRCP, the Kansas City Temptations and the Bruges Last Judgment triptych. In addition, the Adoration of the Magi in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art), for the members of the BRCP a workshop work, could be, for the curators of the centenary exhibition, a work by the master's hand with workshop participation. For its part, the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, owner of the Christ Carrying the Cross questioned by the members of the BRCP, also decided to maintain the attribution of the work to Bosch after new analyses and after confronting the various points of view of specialists at a round table, in which only Jos Koldeweij of the BRCP maintained the attribution to a copyist. The number of works currently considered autograph is, in any case, far lower than the seventy-three catalogued by Mia Cinotti as works by Bosch or attributed to him, or the seventy-one catalogued as such in 1981, some of them definitively excluded after the dendrochronological analyses carried out in the 1990s demonstrated the youth of the wood used as a support, felled after the painter's death. In this situation are the Crowning with Thorns in El Escorial, which could not have been painted before 1527, and the Wedding at Cana in Rotterdam and the Ecce Homo in Philadelphia, whose dates of execution must be pushed back to 1557 or later.

References

Bibliography

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• Fischer, Stefan (2016). Jheronimus Bosch. La obra completa (in español). Köln: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-4244-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Guía de mano (2016). El Bosco en El Escorial. V Centenario (PDF) (in español). Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional. Ediciones El Viso. ISBN 978-84-7120-508-7. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 21, 2016. Retrieved July 5, 2016.
• Hidalgo Ogáyar, Juana (2011). "Doña Mencía de Mendoza y su residencia en el Palacio del Real en Valencia". Archivo Español de Arte (in español). LXXXIV (333): 59–90.
• Koldeweij, Jos; Vandenbroeck, Paul; Vermet, Bernard (2005). Hieronymus Bosch, El Bosco. Obra completa (in español). Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa. ISBN 84-343-1080-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Mateo Gómez, Isabel; Mulazzani, Germano (1981). Todas las pinturas de el Bosco (in español). Barcelona: Noguer. ISBN 84-279-9101-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Matilla Tascón, Antonio (1988). "Felipe II adquiere pinturas del Bosco y Patinir". Goya (in español) (203): 258–261.
• Panofsky, Erwin (2010). Les primitifs flamands (in français). Hazan. ISBN 978-2-7541-0452-4.
• Rêgo, Raul (2007). O processo de Damião de Goes na Inquisição (in português). Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. ISBN 978-972-37-0769-4.
• Salas, Xavier (1943). El Bosco en la literatura española (PDF) (in español). Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Silva Maroto, Pilar (ed.) (2016). El Bosco. La exposición del V centenario (in español). Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado. ISBN 978-84-848-0316-4. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: publisher location (link)

External links

• "Jheronimus Bosch 500" Foundation (in English and Dutch)
• "Leaf through Hieronymus Bosch", animated feature film accompanying the Taschen series (sponsored by the Netherlands Film Fund and the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation).
• Program of commemorative events, 2010–2020, for the 5th centenary of the death of Bosch (part of the previous one)
• Jheronimus Bosch Art Center
• Bossche Encyclopedie (with bibliography) (in Dutch)
• Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP)