IN THE early Middle Ages, illuminators had freely drawn all kinds of imaginary creatures in their margins, but in the fifteenth century, under sturdier guidance from the Church, panel painters were made to understand that it was not all right to indulge their taste for fantasy in any but two forms—(a) angels and (b) devils.Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
Chapter 6 Purgatory and Hell
As usual, it turned out that the devils were the more interesting of the two, but most artists drew them as chimeras—monsters made by adding a small repertoire of animal heads and limbs to human bodies. (These figures survived into the twentieth century as the monsters of fantasy and science fiction.)
Another unwritten rule north of the Alps was that human nudity was allowed only in depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and of sinners in Purgatory and Hell (or on the way there). The beauty of the human body, rediscovered in sunny Italy and celebrated by Michelangelo and Raphael, was not destined to make much headway in the north, where people kept their clothes on. Most nude figures in Northern paintings are idealized and generic—little wedding-cake mannequins surprised without their underwear. Bosch's Eves, his nude women in The Garden of Earthly Delights, and his female sinners in Hell and Purgatory all look very much alike, and half a dozen of them would make one Rubens.The Prado Seven Deadly Sins, designed as a tabletop, is considered an early work because of the dumpy figures and a certain stiffness in the composition. The centerpiece is best viewed by walking around the tabletop, but Philip of Spain hung it on his bedroom wall.Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins. Madrid, Prado.
Southeast of Jesus we see a woman gazing into a hand mirror held out to her by a demon (hiding behind the cabinet). This scene recurs often in fifteenth-century paintings and prints. The mirror is convex, made by silvering part of a bubble of glass; flat mirrors did not come into use until near the end of the century.Three of the four corner tondos, perhaps added later, show a little more sureness of touch. The exception is the Hell tondo, which is just as crude as the centerpiece.Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins (detail). Here we can distinguish a number of the vignettes we will see in later paintings. At six o'clock Superbia (pride) is represented, as in the centerpiece, by a woman being enticed by a demon with a mirror. At nine o'clock Luxuria (lust) shows a naked couple being plucked by demons out of the bed of shame. Another demon has come for the gourmand in Gula (gluttony) at ten o'clock. In Invidia (envy) at twelve o'clock, for some reason black dogs are snapping at naked people half-buried in the earth, and in Accidia (sloth) in the center of the tondo, a demon cook is tenderizing a man who, lying in the arms of another demon, appears too lazy to resist. At two-thirty, in Ira (anger), a demon is preparing to castrate a man spread-eagled on the top of an oven, and below at four o'clock, in Avaritia (avarice), condemned souls are bubbling in a pot.Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins (detail). Other fifteenth-century artists treated their sinners in much the same way, for example Conrad Dinckmut in this 1483 woodcut, Der Seelen Wurzgarten (above), which seems designed to illustrate the seven deadly sins, although it does so with eight sinners. (Lust is represented by a couple—notice how the woman is being nuzzled by the man's phallic serpent.)Conrad Dinckmut, Der Seelen Wurzgarten. Zurich, Kunsthaus, E.16.46.
