Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
Most Northern painters worked with a common repertoire of images, which they copied from other artists and from pattern books and revised for their own use. It was entirely natural for Michael Wolgemut or one of his assistants to use Schongauer's engraving as source material when they wanted to illustrate the medieval legend of Simon Magus. (Simon boasted that he could fly, and did so with the aid of invisible demons, but St. Peter prayed to God and Simon fell to the pavement.)
Finally, coming full circle, Bosch painted a version of the Simon Magus woodcut that turned it into Temptation again. Notice that the demon below the frog (the one partly concealed by Anthony's cloak) carries in its foot a reed and sop, and that the little demon to the right has a scythe.Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, cclix (detail). Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony (detail). In the right panel, Anthony averts his gaze from the witch-queen who tried to seduce him into marrying her. The witch-queen, wearing a flower-petal headdress, is pouring something out of a jug into a bowl held by a frog. The frog is winged, like the one on whose pale belly Anthony sprawls in the left panel.Bosch, Temptation (right panell).
Closer to Anthony, a naked woman stands in the hollow of a dead tree. Behind Anthony is a robed gryllus in a child's walker; below him another, who has legs but no arms. In the corner, under a round tabletop, are two naked men, one with his foot in a jar, the other having his throat cut by a demon. A third man, naked except for a cape, is blowing a fantastic horn.
In the middle ground, a hero with a sword is battling a dragon in the water. The two domed buildings behind them are beacons; one has a fire kindled on top, the other has glowing coals in a bucket at the end of a pivoted arm. We can just make out that the building on the right is being assaulted by a Moorish army with lances and ladders.
These panels, in suggesting that the triptych as a whole is about the St. Anthony legend, have the same function as the radar-reflective chaff that used to be dropped by warplanes. They have little significance of their own, and merely distract us from the real message of the center panel, which we'll come to in a moment.
Meanwhile, notice how deftly the artist has made it appear that the narrative of the three inner panels is continuous. The barren ground in all three supports this idea, and the bridge on the left is so much like the platform in the middle that we naturally think the platform is a bridge too.
Several writers have referred to the puddle as "wastewater," and I think that's an apt expression. This isn't part of a natural system of flowing water, it's the kind of grey water that is dumped out of a washtub—or perhaps, considering the dead fish, we ought to think of it as the effluent of a sewer.In the center panel of Bosch's triptych The Flood, the receding waters are represented by a stagnant pool in which a drowned woman and child are floating. It is this stagnant water, I believe, that turns up in other Bosch paintings to remind us that ever since the Flood we have been living in a suburb of Hell.Bosch, The World After the Flood (detail).
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen.
Gulled by the artist's expert misdirection, we expect the center panel of Temptation to tell us what happened to Anthony between the time he was carried off by demons and the time he was carried home. But if we try to read this tableau as a narrative it doesn't make any sense at all. Here is the hermit, kneeling at a curb that resembles an altar rail, surrounded by an odd group of people who are paying him no attention whatever. To his left is a mob of demons, apparently the ones who have pursued him into this hellish chapel, but Anthony does not appear alarmed by them. Instead, he looks over his shoulder at something or someone outside the picture plane. Why isn't he at least looking at the altar, where Christ himself stands beside a crucifix?
Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony (detail).
A few other questions: Why doesn't the exposed chancel show any sign of weathering? Why don't Anthony's cane and the gryllus's extended foot cast shadows? Why doesn't the Dark Twin's hand close around the beaker, and why is the gryllus's beaker floating above his thigh?