TWO ASPECTS OF BOSCH'S HELL IMAGERY (*)
Few artists of any period offer such a continuous challenge to the art historian as Hieronymus Bosch. To uncover the sources of his imagery, to say nothing of their interpretation, demands a constant search for the distinct artistic ideas he assimilated, chiefly, it seems, from manuscript illuminations and prints, and recombined in his paintings. Bosch was basically traditional in his iconography. However, traditional connotations are at times visually disguised by the manner in which he combined or invented new forms. This suggests that his symbolically oriented mind possessed a sense of the expanding limits characteristic of the life and art of the end of the fifteenth century and the early years of the next. As a result, though his points of departure often elude us, the suggestive content of his art may be intuitively grasped even though it evades concrete analysis. A partial dissection of several of his motifs will allow us to understand more fully how he created his unique picturing of Hell in which meanings and images are so intertwined that his synthesizing interpretations have defied precise apprehension.
Bosch drew upon manuscript illuminations and upon prints for his sources, particularly in his early years, more than upon painted panels. A close relationship to Flemish illuminations is found in what is possibly the earliest of his pictures, the table-top in the Prado Museum, on which he painted the resurrected Christ surrounded by the Seven Deadly Sins in the center, and the Four Last Things in the corner roundels (Fig. 101). Once owned by Philip II, who also possessed a now-lost CQmpanion piece of the Seven Sacraments, it is generally considered to be an early work (1).
(*) Nothing could please the writer more than to offer this essay in affectionate esteem and in fond memory of innumerable discussions with a very dear friend. The evidence and printed here were originally presented as part of a talk at the North-Central Renaissance Conference, Michigan State University, May, 1965.
(1) Charles de Tolnay has remarked (Hieronymus Bosch, 2nd éd., [Baden-Baden, 1966], 338) that he was the first to call the Prado painting an early work, and that subsequent writers have agreed with his attribution, first made in 1937. Support for the presumed date between 1475-80 can be given on the basis of costume rather than style. The headdress of the central woman in the group at Christ's right in the Last Judgment roundel is a close parallel to those found in Geertgen tot Sint Jans's painting of the Holy Kinship, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which is generally given a like date in the late 1470's. A similar headdress appears in a Wedding at Cana in a German private collection, attributed to Hinrik Funhof and dated around 1481 (illustrated in Kindlers Malerei Lexikon, Zurich, 1965, II, 505 ; seemingly Funhof had contact with the Bouts shop). In this last mentioned work the male costumes correspond with that worn by one of the figures in the death scene in the upper left, hand corner of the Prado table- top. Though Bosch dressed some of his figures in costumes earlier than those of his own day, the feminine headdress of the Last Judgment roundel and the man's costume in the death scene seem to be the latest datable items of clothing.
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