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

 
Chapter 12      The Temptation of Saint Anthony
 
Bosch, Temptation of  St. Anthony (center panel). Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga.
THIS GREAT triptych is usually assigned to the years 1500-1509, but no one knows exactly when it was painted (or for whom). It may have been one of the three Temptations that Philip II sent to the Escorial in 1574. If so, Philip bought it from the Portuguese painter Damiano de Goes between 1523 and 1545. Manuel II, the last king of Portugal, gave it to the Portuguese nation. Now it stands on a platform, in the glare of floodlights, in a narrow room of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.
  The panels are almost four and a half feet tall, and the platform adds another two feet. Because it is so large and brightly lit, the center panel speaks with ominous force as we enter the room. No reproduction can prepare us for this: it is as shocking as the sudden glare of a tiger.
   The outer panels (below) are hinged to the center panel and can be closed to cover it.  In the left panel we see Christ being arrested in the garden of Gethsemane. Peter, in the foreground, is about to cut off Malchus's ear. So far this is very conventional, but there are some curious details. High in the sky, a crescent moon rides through a wrack of cloud. To the right on a huge rounded pinnacle is a crucified man, so tiny with distance that we can barely see him. Above Peter on the left Judas is slinking away with his bag of coins hung down his back.
Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony (outer panels).
    In the right outer panel we see Jesus carrying the cross, followed by another crowd. A man in a cloak holds the hand of a young child, and carries another child on his shoulders like St. Christopher. Three more children are sitting on a stone to watch the parade, and St. Veronica is holding up her miraculous kerchief for Jesus to see. In the foreground, priests are talking to the good thief and the bad thief.
   Again, the details are disturbing. In the background, silhouetted against the sky, what looks like the carcass of a hog is hanging upside down from a bare tree, and in the middle ground a human head is impaled on a branch. In the lower right corner, in a puddle like the ones in the inner panels, lies a man who seems to have fallen from a toppled tau cross. Someone has hung a dagger from the cross, and a little pot from one fork of the branch, seeming to imply not cruelty so much as a chilling indifference.
  We turn almost with relief to the inner panels, which tell three parts of the legend of St. Anthony as freely interpreted by Bosch. In the upper part of the left panel we see the hermit Anthony being carried off by flying demons, a scene that is taken at two removes from an engraving called Temptation of St. Anthony by Martin Schongauer.

Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony (left inner panel).

Schongauer, Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1480.

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