Foreword
Chapter 1     The Double Renaissance
Chapter 2     Bosch
Chapter 3     The Marriage at Cana
Chapter 4     The Conjuror and the Fools
Chapter 5     The Flood
Chapter 6     Purgatory and Hell
Chapter 7     The Garden of Earthly Delights
Chapter 8     Tree Rings, Christ, and the Loincloth
Chapter 9     The Adoration of the Magi
Chapter 10    Life and the Vagabond
Chapter 11   The Crowning with Thorns
Chapter 12 The Temptation of St. Anthony
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

THE ART of making what we now call puzzle pictures seems to have arisen around the middle of the fifteenth century. The first such picture that I know of is Bellini's St. Jerome in the Wilderness, where faces can be made out in the stones of the saint's retreat.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, mid-fifteenth century (detail). Florence, Uffizi.

    Piero di Cosimo made two pictures, The Misfortunes of Silenus and The Discovery of Honey, in which faces are hidden in the trunks of pollarded trees.

Piero di Cosimo, Misfortunes of Silenus, c. 1505-10. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum.

Piero di Cosimo, Discovery of Honey, c. 1505-20. Worcester, Massachusetts, Art Museum.

    Bellini's and Piero's puzzles were of the most primitive sort. (Find the hidden faces.) Bosch, who saw other possibilities, taught himself how to put layer upon layer of symbols and allusions into his paintings. We sense that they are there, even when we can't read them, and it is this that gives his work its mesmerizing power.
    Bosch's critics during the past seventy years have earnestly crammed the pictures into ill-fitting categories, rather like the Fathers of the Church explaining away the Old Testament. For the consistent failure of this method they have two excuses. The first is that Bosch meant his puzzle pictures to be understood only by members of some esoteric group—the Adamites, for instance (fifteenth-century nudists and free-lovers), the alchemists, the Cathars, or the Rosicrucians. The second excuse, which has the virtue of apple-cheeked simplicity, is that Bosch was a good Catholic and therefore there is nothing to explain.
    Some art historians argue in effect that everyone in Europe was a Roman Catholic in Bosch's time, and therefore he must have been a Catholic too. The logic is impeccable, but the major premise is wrong—it isn't true that everyone in Europe was a Catholic. Even leaving aside for a moment all the Moors, Jews, and pagans, thousands of Christians denied the authority of the Roman church and rejected its dogma. These people were called heretics (from Greek hairetikos, "able to choose").
    In the thirteenth century one such group, the Cathars or Albigensians, grew so powerful in southern France that they were able to elect their own bishops. The Cathars believed, among other things, that water cannot be holy and cannot sanctify in baptism, that the Cross should not be venerated, for the same reason that one does not venerate a gallows, and that the rite of the Eucharist is a falsehood, because the wafer cannot contain Christ's body (and if it could, people would have eaten it up long ago).
   The inquisitor Bernard Gui wrote, "They [the Cathars] assert that the host comes from straw, that it passes through the tails of horses, to wit, when the flour is cleaned by a sieve [of horse hair]; that, moreover, it passes through the body and comes to a vile end, which, they say, could not happen if God were in it."n
   With the help of northern nobles who were ready and willing to plunder the south, the Church destroyed the Cathars' towns and fortresses and killed thousands in a seventy-year crusade, continued by the Inquisition well into the fourteenth century. The conflict was as much political as religious, and there were ignoble acts on both sides, but the result was to suppress the strongest branch of dissident Christianity, and to send a message to all other heretics that they had better keep their heads down.
   Lynda Harris, author of The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch, gives us many proofs that Bosch was a dualist, and goes on to argue that he must have been a Cathar, because Catharism was the only surviving dualist heresy in the fifteenth century. Like many historians, she seems to take it for granted that heresies are created ex nihilo by upstarts, but there is no evidence for this. It is far more likely that leaders such as Bogomil and Peter Valdes found converts ready to hand among people who saw all around them the evidence that the world was ruled by two gods, one good, one evil. Some beliefs are so attractive and so obvious (whether true or not) that they occur to many people spontaneously—for example the beliefs, shared today by thousands, that Elvis is alive and that the Moon landings of the sixties were studio fakes.
   Dualism in another form was built into Christianity almost from the beginning. The Docetists, a faction of the early Church, believed that Christ during his time on earth had only an apparent or phantom body. Some Gnostics believed in two Christs, one a pure spirit, the other a body of flesh.
   In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth the pure spirit is made to say, "... it was another ... who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over ... their error ... and I was laughing at their ignorance."n
   Many Christians believed Jesus had entered Mary's ear, taken form, and emerged again the way he came in, thus preserving her virginity. But if Jesus was not born of woman in the ordinary way, it was easy to suppose that he never was made of flesh at all. This heresy in particular was a severe problem for the Roman church, because it was so persistent and kept cropping up in different forms. The Church could not allow Christianity to fall apart into a hundred different sects (more or less the situation we have today), and yet it could not convert the dissidents by sweet reason alone.
   It was in this late-medieval world and in the shadow of the Inquisition that Bosch struggled to make his way as an artist, and at the same time to avoid swallowing doctrines that were hateful to him. This conflict and others tormented him most of his life; it was only in his last decade that he found a brilliant method, three centuries before Poe's "The Purloined Letter," for hiding all his secrets in plain sight.

Notes

if God were in it.    The Inquisitor's Manual of Bernard Gui, translated in Readings in European History, ed. J.H. Robinson.^

laughing at their ignorance.    Quoted by Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels, p. 87.^