Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
HERE, IN two versions, we see an oddly dressed young/old man. In one painting he wears a brown headcloth and carries a hat with a carpenter's awl and thread stuck in it. In his other hand he carries a knobbed staff, similar in form to a fool's marotte, and on his back is a peddler's basket. A wooden spoon and two catskins hang from the basket. All these divergent clues tell us that this person is Everyman. His trousers are ragged, and his left leg is bandaged. A deer's foot hangs out of his upper garment. He wears a high-topped shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other. Bax calls this a symbol of destitution, and yet both shoe and slipper are new.Chapter 10 Life and the Vagabond Left, Bosch, The Vagabond. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen.
Right, Bosch, The Path of Life. Madrid, Prado.
This version is usually called The Prodigal Son, because of a misreading that links it to the parable in Luke 15:11-32. As usual, the Dutch name is better—De Landloper (The Vagabond).
The same figure, almost identically dressed, appears in the outer panels of The Haywain, where it is called The Path of Life. In The Vagabond, which is probably later, Bosch has added features that point in two directions at once. In both pictures, the young/old man is walking one way and looking the other. In the background of both versions we see the dunes of North Brabant; in both, tiny in the distance, a man is being crucified. In one version the vagabond is approaching a gate and in the other a bridge, in either case suggesting that the young/old man has a life choice before him.
In The Path of Life we can see a clear reference to Luke 10:30-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Verse 30 reads, "And Jesus answering, said: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, who also stripped him, and having wounded him went away, leaving him half dead. Verse 32: "In like manner also a Levite, when he was near the place and saw him, passed by." In both paintings we see the later life of the one who walked away from his duty, and who now can never do what he left undone.Several critics have suggested that the face of the red-robed friend who is helping to carry the saint home, in the left panel of The Temptation of St. Anthony, is that of the painter himself. If so, the faces of the young/old man in these two paintings must be self-portraits too. That raises the possibility that in these paintings Bosch expressed the guilt he felt when he turned away from the Church and common morality, and savagely satirized the beliefs of his friends and neighbors.
Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony (detail).
In an article published in The Philalethes, April 1999, John J. Robinson pointed out a number of things in The Vagabond that might be construed as references to Masonic ritual. The candidate for initiation into Masonry is "neither shod nor barefoot." His left trouser leg is pushed up to the knee, and his left foot is bare. The object in the vagabond's hat might be a plumb-bob, a Masonic symbol, rather than a shuttle or awl. The strap around his arms and chest could be meant to remind us of the Masonic "cable-tow," although that is a rope around the neck. He wears a hood, perhaps a reference to the "hoodwink" used in the First Degree ceremony, although that is not a hood but a blindfold.
Most of this evidence seems a bit thin, but one element of it, the bare left leg and slipper, is too suggestive to reject out of hand. It's possible, as Robinson argues in his book Born in Blood, that the Freemasons' underground highway hid the Templars who escaped the persecution of Philip IV. But in that case the Masons might have concealed the Cathars too, and Lynda Harris might be right after all.There is a strong resemblance between The Vagabond and The Fool in the Waite-Smith Tarot deck, and an even stronger one in the Marseille deck (late fifteenth century), but this resemblance cannot be traced back any further; the Visconti-Sforza decks do not have it. It seems less likely that Bosch was inspired by an ur-Tarot, now lost, than that later versions of the Fool were based on Bosch's painting. The number of the Fool card, 0, also suggests that it was a late addition.The Tarot
The Tarot suits of wands, cups, swords, and coins can all be found in Bosch's paintings, and there are certain resemblances in The Tower, Judgment, and a few other cards, but there is no good evidence that Bosch's work arose from these.Contents
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