Alastair Smart

Preaching in pictures

According to Nils Büttner, Bosch’s personal life was dull and unadventurous. So what inspired those visions of fiendish torture — or orgies of free love?

To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy of Art and Design has written a revisionist biography of Hieronymus Bosch: one which tells us that the Early Netherlandish painter wasn’t, as many over the centuries have suggested, the devil incarnate or Satan’s crazed representative on earth. Instead, his graphically disturbing visions of hell — infernal soups populated by hybrid monsters — were actually the product of a devoutly Catholic, medieval mind.

Bosch came from a family of painters in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch near Antwerp and, following an orthodox education and advantageous marriage, became an important member of the local religious confraternity, the Illustrious Brethren of our Blessed Lady. This was no sociopathic recluse, but a man of civic significance; his personal life was as staid as his art was wild.

Bosch was one of few northern painters Giorgio Vasari deemed worthy of inclusion in his epochal Lives of the Artists. As Büttner observes, Bosch also counted key figures across Europe as his patrons. Philip the Handsome, King of Castile, paid 360 guilders for the 1504 triptych, ‘The Last Judgment’ (roughly the cost of two small ships). The VIP client list is proof that, however idiosyncratic they may seem to us today, these images didn’t cause outrage in Bosch’s own day. Middle Dutch literature was rich in descriptions of eternal fire and Bosch’s demonically detailed visions were rooted in the tradition of Gothic manuscript illustration.

Büttner is strong on historical context, specifically on how imagery was used by the church in the Middle Ages, through direct, visceral impact, as a means of religious instruction. The idea was to save souls by scaring the illiterate masses, who couldn’t read a Bible, about what awaited them if they lived sinfully.

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