Dali House

The title of this post isn’t a cast-off allusion to Alice in Wonderland. It refers to seeing “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, Hieronymus Bosch’s most famous painting, almost literally in a mirror.

I’ve had a fresh and stunning encounter with Bosch, and he turns out to be quite unlike the artist I first encountered at the same time as everyone else, I suppose — in high school. For this revelatory second chance, full credit goes to Rolf Gross, a retired physicist in California and a fellow member of the Google Earth Community.

Rolf has spent years studying Bosch, and his startling hypothesis slammed him into an academic wall. Having published an historical “Georgian novel” called “Konrad and Alexandra”, Rolf wanted to write a scholarly thesis on Bosch.

“I do see and know many things about Bosch that the arch-conservative German and Dutch art historians cannot see or say,” Rolf told me by email. “I tried to peddle this Bosch paper to various professional journals and received a belligerent letter from a reviewer at the University of Bonn threatening to ostracise me among the publishers.”

Shunned, Rolf turned his paper into a novella in 2005, “The Life and Times of Hieronymus Bosch”, which you can read in full on his website, and he’s condensed his hypothesis into a nevertheless elaborate post on Google Earth, which can be downloaded here. Both of these are truly remarkable works, the latter fully illustrated with Bosch’s art.

For me, seeing the paintings again was quite startling. There were more of them than I’d seen before, and Rolf points out numerous details while explaining the very rational reasons why Bosch was depicting such seemingly hallucinatory scenes.

But what got him into trouble at the gates of the ivory tower was his conclusion that Bosch, revered in more recent times as a Christian moralist, not only had a Jewish adviser, as suggested decades ago by German art historian Wilhelm Fraenger (to catcalls from academia), his adviser was a student of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the founders of Christian Neoplatonic humanism in Florence.

Bosch was early on considered either a heretic or a buffoon attempting to titillate. Only in the 20th century was he embraced as orthodox religious, a late-mediaeval proselytiser given to metaphors and puns yet bound to the New Testament.

But Rolf swims against the modern current, insisting that this presumed portrayer of Christian tales was in fact illustrating the worldview of his Jewish mentors, even if he certainly took liberties.

To Fraenger and Rolf, Ficino and della Mirandola’s tutoring explains how, in 1468, a just-turned-18-year-old could paint the fantastic “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych.

Quite frankly, this level of art scholarship goes way above my head, but even a cursory glance at the debate affords a fascinating glimpse into the depths plumbed in academic research on the masters of the craft.

Rolf points to the accounts of the Leuven Eucharist Brotherhood, where Dieric Bouts the Elder had two learned, Hebrew-speaking advisers, the theologians Jan Varenecker and Aegidius Ballawel, when he painted the Eucharist triptych in Leuven in 1464-67. It was Fraenger who surmised that Jacob von Almaengien best fit the role as Bosch’s own Jewish mentor.

“Closer inspection of the ‘Garden’ triptych shows that Jacob von Almaengien must have been a pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino’s and a friend of Pico della Mirandola’s,” Rolf writes.

“The central panel is Bosch’s rendition of the Pythagorean Paradise Ficino taught in Florence around 1460. This is the reason why the beautiful people are mere phantoms. They are the souls of the chosen who, through Love, rise through the four levels of Ficino’s Universe. Only Bosch omitted the fourth, where Ficino places the ‘graven’ image of the ‘Christian God Father’.”

Convention dictates that the left panel depicts the Creation of Eve from Genesis, while the right panel shows Hell.

The triptych, Rolf believes, should be “read” right to left, like Hebrew, with “Hell” as the beginning of the souls’ migration. The marriage performed by Christ as the founder of the “New Covenant” is their goal in the left panel.

“The chosen enter through a hidden gate from the hellish place on the right — which is ‘Our World’. This Hell is examined by the ‘New Man’, of whom Pico della Mirandola in his celebrated ‘Oratio De Hominis Dignitate’ would write in 1483:

The Supreme Maker said: “We have placed you at the centre of the world, so that you may observe and consider all that is in the world. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper, mould yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lowest brutish forms of life; but you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.“

Rolf calls this “the best description of Almaengiens and Bosch’s credo”.

“The three authors of the triptych — Jacob von Almaengien, Sibylle, the medium and Jacob’s later wife, and young Hieronymus with his curly hair, hide in a cave in the lower right-hand corner of the middle panel.”

In the right panel is a knife with a nick in its blade, slicing into an ear. “A knife with the same hallmark of a neighbouring knife-smith and the same nick was found in a dump near Bosch’s house by the urban archeologists!” Rolf says, amused by the “realities” depicted in this “surreal” painting.

Rolf (who scorns any suggestion that Bosch was a proto-surrealist — “His imagery is so deeply imbedded in the late Gothic as to be ‘realistic’ from his point of view and that of his time”) is convinced that the paintings closely reflect the life of the artist, as “elusive” as it remains in the historical documents.

But there’s a 10-year gap in Bosch’s output after 1505. Art historians, “if they care to comment at all,” says Rolf, “blame this on the loss of Bosch’s late works. Frankly I think this is nonsense. Philip Il, at the end of the 16th century, knew the work of Bosch to perfection — and especially the heretic, Hebrew panels — he would have confiscated any other extant paintings by him.”

This is the outside of the triptych when it’s folded together, an image I’d never seen before. Titled “The Third Day of Creation”, it “appears innocuous”, Rolf notes, but the two inscriptions in Latin — “He spoke and it was done” and “He commanded and they were created” — come from the Psalms of David, not Genesis.

Someone later softened Bosch’s “affrontery”, Rolf believes, by adding a miniature God the Father to the picture.

All of this takes on living, breathing life in Rolf’s novella. Bosch’s art is obviously of the type that can only be fully appreciated when its context is revealed. By extrapolating on the known biographical details of his life, the novella goes a long way toward explaining the content of his paintings, and it’s a gripping, emotional story.

Jeroen van Aken of Den Bosch and his mentor van Almaengien embark on a journey of pilgrimage that produces one startling episode after another. Bosch is, of course, no less astonishing in the paintings he creates.

Jacob asks where he has seen the creatures that crowd his artwork.

“In my dreams at times,” Bosch replies, but many come from Sibylle’s visions. Entranced, “She will beat her arms, make a rat face and screech like an owl. Then I see such a mixed animal in my imagination, and when the Guelders devastate the country one can see any number of mutilated people dying. Sibylle also has visions of great fires and is much afraid of them. The world can be a horrifying place.”

Readers witness the painting process, learn the logic behind it, and watch the Garden triptych evolve.

Tragedy and promise insert themselves into the story. A calamitous flood in 1477 takes the lives of Sibylle and her child, rending Jacob’s heart and spirit; the following year Bosch marries and becomes a property owner, wealthy enough to paint as he likes, freed from the yoke of commissions and expectations, with an unchained imagination.

Meanwhile, to present further evidence of how good the hi-res imagery of the Prado Museum collection is on Google earth — in the new feature I described earlier, here is a series of views of the Garden triptych.

Below, spot the elephant and his pal.