Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Story
Hieronymus Bosch was the Netherlandish painter of heaven, hell and every nightmare in between, the man who filled altarpieces with demons, mutant creatures and human folly five hundred years before Surrealism had a name. We know almost nothing certain about his life, yet his Garden of Earthly Delights is still one of the strangest and most studied paintings ever made.
Stand in front of a Bosch and you keep finding things: a man inside an egg, a knife between two ears, a bird headed monster eating the damned. Nobody has ever painted quite like him.
A life almost entirely missing
Bosch was born around 1450 in the Dutch town of Den Bosch, which gave him the name we use. Beyond a handful of records, his life is a blank: no letters, no diary, no certain self portrait. Only about twenty five paintings survive that scholars feel sure are his. The wildest imagination in early European art belongs to a near total stranger.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
His masterpiece is a triptych. On the left, Eden. In the centre, a huge garden of naked figures lost in pleasure. On the right, a dark, burning hell full of punishment. Open and shut, paradise turns to damnation, and five centuries of viewers have argued about what it means.
Hell like no one before him
Bosch built an entire visual language of damnation: hybrid beasts, the haunting Tree Man with a hollow body, ears skewered on a blade, instruments of music turned into instruments of torture. His iconography of sin is so original that we still borrow from it whenever we picture hell.
Moralist, not madman
It is tempting to call him a lone weirdo or a secret heretic. Most scholars now read him the other way: a deeply orthodox, moralizing painter who used shock to preach. The horrors are warnings. Bosch wanted to scare his viewers straight, and his clients were respectable churchmen and nobles who knew exactly what he was doing.
The song from hell
One detail shows how alive his work still is. In the hell panel of the Garden, a tiny piece of musical notation is painted across the backside of a damned soul. In 2014 a curious student transcribed it and played it, and the so called butt song from hell went viral online. A six hundred year old joke, finally heard.
Bosch's long shadow
For centuries he was a curiosity. Then the Surrealists found him and claimed him as a grandfather: Dali, Ernst and Miro all studied his impossible creatures. Modern eyes, raised on strange dreams and stranger films, finally caught up with what Bosch was doing in 1500.
Quick answers about Hieronymus Bosch
Who was Hieronymus Bosch? A Netherlandish painter famous for fantastical religious scenes.
When was he born? Around 1450, in Den Bosch in the Netherlands.
When did he die? In 1516.
What is he famous for? The Garden of Earthly Delights.
What style is he? Early Netherlandish, and a forefather of Surrealism.
Where can I see his work? The Prado in Madrid holds the greatest group, including the Garden.
Of the roughly twenty five paintings that survive, the finest hang in the Prado in Madrid. They are there because King Philip the Second of Spain collected Bosch obsessively, drawn to the same visions of sin and judgment that still stop visitors in their tracks today.