|
Bosch: an anguished visionary.
Text
by Carlos Yusti (Chile), exclusively for Stylusart..
The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, commonly known as Bosch, provide
entrance to a universe of disturbing images; at times absurd yet fantastic.
They predict a heavy laden and incredible future. They also allow the
spectator to contemplate the mentality of humanity at a crucial time in
history, the Middle Ages.
Details of Bosch's life are few and far between moreover the little
information we do have is full of incongruities. His complete name was
Jhéronimo van Aken, oriundo of Hertorgenbosch. It seems that he made a
trip to Spain where he joined the brotherhood of Our Lady. He married
Aleyt, the daughter of an influential business man and religious fanatic,
Goyart van den Mervenne.
Considering the time in which Bosch was alive and painting, the
unsophisticated and extreme religious furor that characterized the Middle
Ages was deteriorating. All of a sudden people were moving away from
religious preconceptions because the church had been converted into a
corrupt and defiant bureaucratic place of the desolate. |
Hieronymus Bosch.
Garden of Earthly Delights.
Central panel. c.1504-1510.
Oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
|
|
Hieronymus Bosch. Ecce Homo. 1
485-1490.
Oil on panel.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
|
It was by no coincidence that people's habits and customs became freer. The
burgesses paid high fees to have their sins forgiven while the poor and
vulnerable lost themselves in the dark worlds of gambling, prostitution and
vice; they developed a taste for uncontrollable passions. In addition to
all of this decadent moral, or lack thereof, the deterioration of the
mystic symbol of hell and demons no longer shocked anyone, not even the
children.
Bosch found himself in the middle of these times of convoluted change. Not
only his religious beliefs were affected, but even his esthetic mental
structures made a surprising jump back to his origins. Drawing from his
radical visionary spirit, he transposed medieval symbols into his
paintings. He imprinted his work with anguish and feverish imagination.
In his early work, he painted a shattered world of transition that was
falling apart because it lacked an honest ethic and religious base. The
stupidity, frivolity and the superficiality of his time seem to infect
everything he portrayed with a pandemia worse than the plague. |
When idiots are not the subject of his paintings, the insane are. His
painting "The ship of fools", is an open satire on collective insanity that
had hopelessly befallen the world. His interpretation and representation
more than likely took inspiration from the book by Brandt, Stultifera
Navícola "The ship of fools". In his painting, Bosch subtly unmasks
hierarchy: men in the labyrinth of their own obsessions and desires loose
clarity of spirit, those sailing with no direction singing, drinking on
the open sea, hopelessly lost.
Through Boschs pictorial work, his enormous curiosity and his rich
imaginative capacity are made evident. He was interested in alchemy to
quench his desire for the mysterious. He was also interested in botany and
zoology. Both mystic and other far away places, hardly known at that time,
caught his attention. The sadistic machines he envisioned mark him as an
inventor full of creative genius. In some of his paintings we even find
underwater scenes, boats and a great variety of futuristic extravagant
means of transportation. |
Hieronymus Bosch.
Haywain. 1485-1490.
Central panel of the triptych.
Oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
|
|
Hieronymus Bosch. Last Judgement.
Central panel of the triptych.
1500s.
Oil on panel.
Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria.
|
One of his other well known paintings, "The Garden of Earthly Delights", is
also charged with a moral message: earthly pleasures are the cause of
humanity's downfall. This garden goes beyond the parameters of simple
imagination or fantasy. In this painting, humanity, in its greatness or in
its misery, is excellently portrayed.
This insight on Bosch, more superficial than profound, might seem out of
place at this precise moment in this time of high technology. However, it
does correspond in part to the paradigms of the world in which we are now
living. It seems we have been taken into spiritual involution which
converts the anguish of emptiness and the idea that anything goes to
existential proposals.
Little by little we are creating our own immense garden of virtual earthly
delights: the plague has been substituted by AIDS, the demons of publicity
drive us to consumer pleasures, the creatures of aversion imagined by Bosch
are no figment of the imagination; political charlatans and the most absurd
churches proliferate like weeds and make a place for themselves at the cost
of a great number of insecure people who are looking for truth and a life
with no surprises. Fanaticism has changed its coat and has returned for the
faithful. In the end, our real digitized world seems like it is colored by
paint applied from the hand of Bosch, clear but nevertheless without
metaphor and sadly missing his eloquent touch of beauty and delicacy
Carlos Yusti ( Chile)
carlosyusti@cantv.net
|
|
