Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight

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THE TWO Renaissances, one in Italy and one in the North, are represented here by two portraits, one by Leonardo, who came late in the Southern Renaissance, and one by Robert Campin, who came at the beginning of the Northern. Leonardo's painting, the most famous portrait in the world, is full of chiaroscuro, sfumato, and other Italian refinements. Campin's, by contrast, is hard-edged and clean, almost photographic. Leonardo's artistic heirs are Raphael, Rubens, and Titian, the painters of emotion; Campin's are Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Jan Vermeer, the painters of what is.
    Bosch's early work shows no trace of any influence of Campin and his group, but late in life, as we will see, he borrowed from an unknown Campin follower and from Campin's pupil Rogier van der Weyden.
    Campin appeared in Tournai in 1406; we don't know where he came from or where he had studied, but he invented a school of painting, "the new Flemish realism."  In 1410 he acquired the status of a burgher in Tournai, and served on three city councils, but was driven out of office by outraged burghers when it was discovered that, although married, he was leading a "filthy and dissolute life" with one Laurence Polette. This incident reminds us that the private lives of religious artists did not always match the solemnity of their paintings.
    Campin's style was that of the Flemish miniaturists, hard-edged, evenly lighted, with no more emphasis on faces than on embroidered patterns. Jan Van Eyck took this manner to a height that never was or could be surpassed; in his Adoration of the Lamb every leaf on every bush is painted separately with exquisite care.

THE ARTIST we call Hieronymus Boschn was so inconsiderate—or perhaps so cautious—as to die without leaving behind any scrap of correspondence that he ever wrote or received. Five hundred years later, we know less about him than we do about Shakespeare. The only hint we have is a copy of a self-portrait, apparently made when he was old.  He looks like someone who has lost all his teeth; many people did in those days. Guessing that the portrait was made shortly before he died in 1516, and guessing his age at 66 then, we arrive at a date of 1450 for his birth. But it's a guess.
     His real name was Jheronimus Anthonis-zoon van Aken. His familiar name was Jeroen (pronounced Yeroon). Both Jheronimus and Jeroen are Netherlandish versions of Jerome, the saint he was named for. When he signed his paintings (only eight times that we know of), he signed them "Jheronimus Bosch," probably in imitation of Italian artists who took the names of their birthplaces (and gave similar names to foreign painters).
     He was born in 's-Hertogenbosch, in the southern tip of the Netherlands between modern Belgium and Germany.  The name meant, more or less, "around the Duke's woods." The ch at the end of "bosch" was then like the hawking noise at the end of "loch," but the modern Dutch have stopped pronouncing it at all; if you say "boss," that's close enough. The residents have also shortened the name of their town:  they call it simply Den Bosch, The Woods, and from now on I will too.
    When the artist lived there, Den Bosch was a flourishing commercial town of twenty thousand. In its cathedral of Sint Jans there was a famous miracle-working image of the Virgin, the "Zoete Lieve Vrouw" (Sweet Dear Woman).  Bosch's grandfather, his father, three uncles and a brother were painters in Den Bosch. Their name, van Aken (or Acken, or Aquen), probably meant that the family came from Aachen, just across the present border in Germany.
    We assume in the absence of information that young Bosch was trained in a family workshop. According to Erik Larsen, in 1474 he signed with his father a promissory note for "25 Rhenish guilders," to be repaid in three instalments. In all likelihood, Bosch used this money to set up his own workshop. In the same year he married a young woman
of good family, Aleid van de Mervenne. She was just twenty-five,n and if our chronology is correct, Bosch was about the same age. Her mother's name, which I think wonderful, was Postuluna Rutgersdochter van Arkel. As far as the record shows, they had no children.
     The record, which discloses very little, does not show that Bosch ever left home. Some cautious critics take this to mean that he never did leave home, but his paintings (and a few critics) tell a different story. Slatkes and Harris think he spent some time in Venice, where he met Leonardo and Giorgione. Their evidence is flimsy, their intuition first-rate.
    The flimsy evidence: For Leonardo they have a sketch of grotesque faces and one of a wolf (or some other animal) in a boat. For the Giorgione connection they point to the artist's Three Philosophers, in which they identify Giorgione himself as the first figure, Bosch the second, and Leonardo the third.

Giorgione, Three Philosophers, 1508-09. Vienna, Kunsthistorische Museum.

    The second and third philosophers are stock figures found in other Giorgione paintings. The supposed Leonardo is represented as an old man and the supposed Bosch as young, although the real Bosch and Leonardo were almost exactly the same age.

 
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