Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
Left, Bosch, St. John on Patmos (detail). Berlin-Dahlem, Staatliche Museen.
Right, Giorgione,Three Philosophers (detail).But Slatkes and Harris have overlooked two strong pieces of evidence in favor of their argument. First, the appearance and posture of Bosch's St. John in St. John on Patmos mimic those of Giorgione's soulful young philosopher (above). Second, Bosch's malicious soldier in the Frankfurt Ecce Homo is obviously drawn from the squire in Giorgione's Portrait of a Man in Armor (below).
The expression on the soldier's face as he puts his hand under Christ's cloak is a fascinating blend of malice, elation, and cowardice overcome. The squire's face shows an equally riveting emotion. (I once saw a very similar expression on the face of a woman standing at the head of a line in a theater in Honolulu, when it was her turn to kiss on the mouth an entertainer named Don Ho.)Left, Bosch, Ecce Homo (detail). Frankfurt am Main, Städelsches Kunstinstitut mit Stadtischer Galerie.
Right.,Giorgione, Portrait of a Man in Armor with His Page (detail), c. 1509. Florence, Uffizi.
I believe Bosch spent some time in Venice, the home of Giorgione and Bellini. I also believe he was in nearby Padua, where he saw Tullio Lombardo's drawings or model for his sculpture The Miracle of the Miser's Heart in the Capella del Santo.
Left, Bosch, Last Judgment (detail). Vienna, Akademie der bildenden Kunst.
Right, Tullio Lombardo, Miracle of the Miser, 1520-25. Padua, Capella del Santo.Bosch is not mentioned in the records of the Dear Sweet Woman confraternity in the years 1495-1510 or in 1514-15. It is during these periods that I think he is likeliest to have traveled. If there was a meeting between Bosch and Giorgione, it must have taken place either in 1509, when Giorgione painted Three Philosophers and Warrior, or in 1510, the year of Giorgione's death. Thus St. John on Patmos, The Marriage at Cana, and The Crucifixion might have been made at any time between 1509 and 1514. The likeliest date for Bosch's Crowning with Thorns is 1515. The Vienna Last Judgment could not have been painted much before 1516, the year when Tullio Lombardi recorded his agreement to carve The Miracle of the Miser's Heart in Padua. These constraints make it probable that there were two trips to Venice, one in 1509-10, the other in 1515-16, and there may have been an earlier one in which he went only as far as Bruges and Ghent.
Another portrait of Giorgione (Big George) is Filippino Lippi's in the Church of San Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. He appears here on the right with his friend and collaborator Giulio Campagnola (left).One more thing: Conventional critics, schooled to believe that art is earnest, invariably fail to notice Bosch's jokes. In St. John on Patmos, for instance, he parodied an old tradition by inserting a wasp-waisted little demon in the lower right-hand corner, where John's eagle is usually found. If, as I think, the demon is a sardonic self-caricature, it should serve as a rebuke to all the critics who have treated this painter as a moralist without any gift of even the darkest humor.
Filippino Lippi, fresco. Rome, Chiesa di S. Maria sopra Minerva.
Bosch, St. John on Patmos (detail).
Leonardo da Vinci, Bosch's close contemporary (they were born and died a few years apart), seemed so far ahead of his era that many people have half-seriously wondered if he was a time-traveler. Maarten Beks raises similar questions about Bosch in his essay "A Great Age, But Who Would Want to Have Lived Then?":Was Bosch a Time-Traveler? How does someone who is left behind by rebellious astronauts on a journey through time, behave in Den Bosch in the fifteenth century? Most problems which arise in this situation are as fascinating as they are insoluble. But there is only one answer to the question about how someone in that position would feel—they would feel dreadful. Any time other than one's own time is a prison, but in our imagination the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have the character of a world-encompassing dungeon. Therefore it is not really very surprising that someone with Bosch's awesome imagination did all he could to lead a retiring life. (...) But what exactly do we mean when we say that Bosch was ahead of his time? In fact, we do not really mean anything by it, because only the fifteenth century, a time of discoveries and great physical and metaphysical fear, fits Bosch the artist like a glove.n
