Hellzapoppin’

The 20th-century painter who called himself Balthus once proposed that a monograph about him should begin with the words ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures.’ But while Balthus may have felt that far too much was known about his private life, Hieronymus Bosch is an artist about whom we truly know if not exactly nothing then very little that is personal or revealing. He adopted his name from his native town, ’s-Hertogenbosch, where his death 500 years ago is marked by a superb exhibition. Bosch (c.1450–1516) was christened Jheronimus — alternatively Joen or Jeroen — van Aken, came from a family of painters and died, perhaps of an epidemic disease, aged about 65. And that, apart from a few mundane details, is almost all the information that survives — except for one credo. At the top of a drawing he wrote the words ‘Poor is the mind that always uses the inventions of others and invents nothing itself.’

‘The ship of Fools’ by Hieronymus Bosch

In that respect — wildly imaginative brainstorming — Bosch’s mind was fabulously rich. The image he drew underneath that sentence is a case in point. It is an illustration of a proverb, ‘The wood has ears, the field has eyes,’ meaning keep quiet about your business. Bosch, however, has interpreted it both literally and — to use a term from a much later period of art — surreally.

Against the trunks of a small thicket of trees are leaning a couple of monstrous, detached ears. The ground in front sprouts eyes, and in the centre is a hollow tree from which a huge owl — a bird that the painter was particularly fond of depicting — stares out.