Fränger and Beyond

True to his word, Fränger followed his interpretation of the “Millennium” triptych with studies of several other paintings seen from the same perspective. He claimed that they were also the products of Bosch’s association with the Community of the Free Spirit and its Grand Master, who instructed him in the arcana of the cult’s quasi-religious practices that the artist then displayed in carefully secreted symbols. Most of these paintings were done before the “Millennium”, the historian claimed, thus bearing out his thesis that the apprenticeship of student to teacher was long and progressive.

In 1948, Fränger wrote his first article, after the initial introduction of the Grand Master in his book, on Bosch’s John the Baptist (p. 125), published in 1948. He noted the similarity of the wilderness setting in which John reposes to that of the Garden of Eden in the “Millennium,” wherein the artist had transformed God into Christ and placed Him in a triangulated relationship with Adam and Eve. One of John’s pronouncements, “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, Fränger thought accounted for the paradisiacal setting of the St John painting. The curious, composite plant growing beside John was so like the plants used as “chiliastic symbols” in the Garden of the “Millennium” that the connection between the two paintings was obvious to Fränger who thus saw St John as the mediating emblem of the esoteric society that he introduced in the millennial painting.

It was not long before the Grand Master ceased to be elusive, because Fränger claimed, in his article on Bosch’s St John on Patmos, published in 1949-1950, to have discovered the man’s identity2. He had learned that a Jewish resident of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, named Jacob van Almaengien, was baptised ceremoniously in the presence of Philip the Fair of Brabant. Nothing but circumstantial evidence in the official records connected this man with the artist, but he was listed as having been registered as a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady for the year 1496-1497, under the Christian name Philip van Sint Jan; Bosch had been a member of that order since 1486. This was not proof enough to convince many Boschian historians, especially the Dutch ones, such as Dirk Bax, yet the evidence was so compellingly argued by Fränger that to Patrik Reuterswärd and others it seemed highly suggestive. Something that happened in Brussels at the beginning of the 15th century can hardly explain conditions in ‘s-Hertogenbosch a hundred years later. While this objection seems justified, I should like to recall the difference between proof and circumstantial evidence. While anyone who can be convinced only by proof will be obliged to reject Fränger’s case, his reconstruction of the reality that underlies the great Prado triptych rests equally on a mass of circumstantial evidence whose diversity alone should compensate for the lack of conclusive proof.

Fränger, encouraged by the consistency of his evidence, drew very far-reaching conclusions, claiming that considerable information about the personality and life of Bosch’s patron could be derived from this triptych and from other works. According to him, Bosch was working for none other than the leader of the hypothetical sect, the Grand Master himself.

The Hay Wagon (left panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Hay Wagon (detail, left panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Fränger’s most trenchant case (after his book on the “Millennium”) for Almaengien’s influence over Bosch’s iconography was presented in his book of 1950 on The Marriage Feast at Cana (p. 130). Here, he claimed that the artist had turned the chamber of the marriage feast into the dining hall of a wealthy family with no qualms about ostentatious display at the same time as he turned it into a place of heathen practice. The author assumed this image to be the marriage of the Grand Master that is being celebrated. According to Fränger, this man had instructed Bosch in every visual manifestation of the strange ceremony shown as being enacted here. Not only does the painting include essential dogma of the society, but it reveals Almaengien’s marriage to be a signal marker in the society’s life. Events showing him as a much younger man, casting out devils after overcoming their malevolency and confessing the sins of his earlier life before acting much as Christ did in bringing salvation and bearing God’s message, had supposedly been depicted by Bosch at the Master’s behest in four medallions painted in grisaille on the back of an altarpiece called As it was in the Days of Noah.

To Fränger’s mind, the marriage banquet at Cana, in which Christ performed his first miracle, was Bosch’s showpiece of the society’s secret rituals. The painting’s dominant colours of red, white, and black, in addition to being alchemically significant, are the earthen triad in rabbinical tradition, from which God fashioned Adam. Thus, they, as well as other evidence in the form of demonstrable symbols, help set the stage for the event described by Fränger:

A Jewish marriage celebrated before a pagan altar; Jesus and his mother in a gathering of idolaters; a bride and bridegroom who keep to themselves in rapt silence instead of mixing with the guests; a weird mixture of bourgeois, monastic, and Semitic costumes – all these singularities indicate that the painter was less intent on illustrating the Bible story than on applying it to a very specific contemporary context.

A biblical reference that justified to Fränger (and by his admission, to De Tolnay before him) Bosch’s association of the Grand Master and the Community of the Free Spirit with his treatment of The Marriage Feast at Cana was Saint Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils” (10:21). Fränger pointed out in great detail the signs demonstrating to him that the Grand Master, member of a heretical society, himself, is struggling against the heresy represented by other members of the wedding party gathered in the room.

Although this is a Jewish home, the guests are being served foods forbidden in Jewish law, a boar’s head and a swan (emerging from their heads are rays, a sickle, and flames), nothing else that would suggest a banquet. There is an air of ritual solemnity among the participants. Behind the bride is an altar furnished with symbolic objects relating to male-female sexuality in both high and low forms: a half-sphere that is both breast and vagina and a mortar with upright pestle standing next to an urn whose shape reminds Fränger of the position of the frog held aloft by the black paramour at the altar of the Lisbon St Anthony. The frog, of course, is redolent of “swampy procreation” (Fränger, 1951), in other words, the nadir of sexual depravity; it is also related, Fränger

tells us, to a cult symbol of Egypt that had lasted in demonic initiation rites into Bosch’s time. Thus, it seems, Bosch is revealing this group’s members as being devotees of an anti-church older than the Judeo-Christian tradition. Fränger concludes:

Only a syncretism wholly indifferent to religious affiliation could permit the uncontrolled lability and intermixing of creeds at the Grand Master’s wedding. The leader of a heretic Christian community is marrying into a heretic Jewish family. He, for his part, has no objection to the marriage being celebrated according to their heretical temple ritual. But, although he is willing to celebrate the nuptial mystery, he uses it only to turn away towards the opposite world, revealed in the presence of Jesus….

So, Wilhelm Fränger continued to proselytise for the position of the Grand Master in controlling the content of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings.

We are left with a mystery that probably will never be resolved completely. It could be rejected out of hand, as with some successors to this historian, except that there are still some intriguing signs that more than the unembellished biblical story is being told in the Marriage. How to explain the finger positioning pointed out by Fränger, by which several of the banqueters hold the middle three fingers together, and the thumb and forefinger apart? We shall never know for sure and may ask why should we? The spirit of the miracle is here, enveloping the scene; perhaps, this is all that the artist wished his viewers to receive (we must note here how later research – Koldeweij/Vermet – has claimed the painting to have been created in 1561, or later).

Fränger saw the hooded crow as being the symbol of the Grand Master in the Garden of Eden and the central panel of the “Millennium” painting; he also identified this symbol in several more paintings, including Bosch’s “weightiest triptychs”: The Hay Wagon, the Vienna Last Judgement (pp. 186-187), and the Lisbon Temptation of Saint Anthony(pp. 152-153). Fränger considered the latter painting to be filled with “rampant satanic licentiousness” such that its “polemical excesses embitter the religious theme with witches’ venom”. Consequently, he thought it left behind all heretofore conventional treatments of the theme and called into question its interpretation by other historians.

In his exegesis on Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, Fränger spoke of the “magical” effect of moving from the “leaden-grey prologue” of the outer panels to the “hallucinatory luminosity of the three inner panels on which the strangest phantasmagoria unfolds”. (Since a thorough description of these panels will form a coda to this book, I will not present Fränger’s description here, except in a few of his phrases that add to what he saw as the combined magical/diabolical nature of the altarpiece.) The central landscape of the inner panels is replete with a “cyclopean cave”, “exotic towers”, an “obelisk with reliefs”; in “an in-between land where the familiar veers off into the uncanny”, where a “spooky tumult in which sexuality intertwines with the trefoil of idolatry, magic, and sodomy serves above all to excite the roving eye”. Anthony kneels against a balustrade that frames a stage behind him: “This bare silver-grey dance floor for evil spirits looks like a sheet of ice on which no one may set foot, for in the dark hollows beneath its gleaming surface lies a miasmic slough”.

The Hay Wagon (detail, left panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Allegory of Intemperance, c. 1495-1500. Oil on panel, 35.9 x 31.4 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

What has this strange treatment of the Temptation theme to do with The Community of the Free Spirit and its leader? It seems that the Old Testament scenes on the central obelisk furnish the “weightiest proof” that Jacob van Almaengien was the altarpiece’s “spiritual author”. That is because, Fränger supposed, such a man would have associated his own spiritual integrity, in the face of the idolatry into which the Jews had fallen, with that of Saint Anthony, “the true servant of God amid the unleashed denizens of hell”.

Fränger is good reading, everyone agrees, but most historians do not agree that his creation is more than a fabrication of his own imagination. Many more very reputable historians tackled the enigma of Hieronymus Bosch both before and after Fränger died in 1964. Writing still in the late 1950s, soon after Fränger discharged his first salvo, several historians began to stress the more serious, possibly even conventional appeal of Bosch’s paintings: Max Friedländer sounded the general view that the artist’s contemporaries “considered them as sermons with a moral”. Charles Cuttler averred that “Bosch’s unnatural yet natural beings, pieced together with artistic rather than natural logic, were a perfect vehicle for his serious, moralising exaltation of basic Christian ideals” (Cuttler, 1957).

In 1959, Ludwig von Baldass identified several of the artist’s patrons as being eminently respectable: Philip the Fair of Brabant and his sister the Archduchess Margaret, William of Orange and the Archduke Ernest, as well as more common (but undoubtedly affluent) citizens of Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Antwerp – including Rubens in the 17th century. Von Baldass also mentioned Bosch’s influences among his great Flemish forebears (assuming that he did not know those from Ghent – mainly Jan van Eyck or Hugo van der Goes) as Roger van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Geertgen, and Hans Memling, as well as several ‘International Style’ artists (through a tondo from Italy, perhaps?) (Von Baldass, 1960). He thought the artist was the first in Flanders and Holland to understand the importance of drawing for planning and clarifying details. In addition, Von Baldass saw Bosch as a consummate inventor, never drawing only what he saw or taking from other artists, but creating his images from his own imagination. The becalming influence of these reports was challenged many times by other, less placid ones to follow. A kind of final period was put on the moralising direction in the introduction to the translation of a book by Bax, published in 1979. The author of the introduction, Irving L Zupnick, wrote about the Lisbon Temptation:

This exemplary exposition of the Saint’s experiences in the wilderness, which invites us all to make similar efforts at self-control and religious devotion, was a most convenient subject for Bosch, much of whose work is concerned with the moral conflict faced by man, in which he is torn between his knowledge of what is good, and his animal inclination towards the pleasures of life.

Walter Gibson performed an enormous service to Boschian scholarship when he drew together all of the diverse strands of interpretation from the 16th century until the publication of his Hieronymus Bosch: An Annotated Bibliography, in 1983. In his lucid and detailed book of 1973 (T&H) and the Introduction to his bibliography of 1983, he laid out three stages of Boschian interpretation.

The first comprised the 16th to 18th centuries when Bosch was known chiefly for his paintings of the devils and hell, although a few writers, mainly Filipe de Guevara and Father José de Següenza, noted that the artist painted satires on the soul as well as the “sins and ravings of man”.

The second stage was during the 19th century when writers became aware of Bosch the artist as well as moraliser, and discovered archival material casting him in a more pragmatic biographical light as well as a more normal religious light. With the 20th century began an appreciation of Bosch the artist – in relation to Dutch realism in genre and landscape. The earliest monographs on Bosch came in the 20th century, with those by Gossart, Lafond, De Tolnay, Von Baldass, Friedländer, and Combe being the most important. In contrast to the pre-WWII tendency to stress the medieval Christian theology behind Bosch’s imagery, no matter how novel or even bizarre it might seem, Gibson pointed out that the post-war studies took different tracts, concentrating on psychological sources as probed by Freud or Jung or as possibly distorted in Bosch’s own psyche. They also included sources that Gibson said were seldom if ever tapped by earlier critics: “alchemy, astrology, and the other occult sciences, as well as various gnostic doctrines”.

Except for a few, Gibson saw most of the subsequent scholars in the post-war period as trying to discover the “key” which Panofsky was seeking when he dismissed Bosch as “too high for my wit”. They went back and forth between studies like those of Bax which did not analyse Bosch’s cryptic imagery so much as describe it and those that continued to apply what Fränger had called “whole libraries” (Chicago, 7) in an attempt to relate the imagery to aspects of Dutch or medieval culture and literature of the period. Some of the recent studies that are less usual include one co-authored by Neal Myers and Wayne Dynes, which found the key to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delightsin the Canticle of Isaiah.

They pointed out passages in which Isaiah railed against drunkenness, equating them with Bosch’s many images in his triptych that apparently connote drunkenness, especially in the hell scene. Among their most cogent arguments for Isaiah as being the artist’s chief inspiration is their association of the vineyard prepared by the prophet’s “beloved” (or the Lord) to grow grapes but that grew “wild grapes” (or wreaked bloodshed instead of justice and wrung a cry against righteousness, itself). When the vintner then neglected his vineyard, it went to seed and produced briers and other extraneous plants, accounting for those in the Garden and central scenes of the Earthly Delights, much embellished through Bosch’s imagination, of course.

Among the striking recent studies have been those of Laurinda Dixon. She built upon the alchemical interpretations of Bosch’s work, but sought a middle ground between what she considered their too disparate approaches. She found this in the more mundane field of pharmacy. Not only had there been a pharmacist in Bosch’s wife’s family, but Dixon believed that the artist’s middle-class background would have drawn him more to the practical craft of pharmacy, which was associated with both alchemy and medicine but was much less esoteric than they. She saw the Lisbon Saint Anthony triptych as being “An Apothecary’s Apotheosis” (the title of one of her articles), with many references to the instruments of distillation that were used in alchemy to transmute raw materials into a state capable of healing the body or perfecting imperfect matter and in pharmacy to create medicines that would balance the

The Hay Wagon (detail, central panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Hay Wagon (detail, central panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (pp. 70-71)

The Hay Wagon (detail, central panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. humours in patients’ bodies. Thus, Dixon viewed the panoply in the open Saint Anthony as not only revealing incidents in the saint’s life but as symbolising the activities in an Antonime monastery devoted to healing and comforting victims of virulent illnesses – most particularly the “horrific” affliction called “Saint Anthony’s Fire”, now believed to have been derived from ergotism, caused by eating contaminated rye grain baked into loaves of bread.

In another article, Dixon interpreted the central section of The Garden of Delights as an allegory of “distillation,” conceived to be “cyclical and self-perpetuating. Its end resided to a certain degree in its beginning, in imitation of the rhythm of nature”. She believed that the goal of this process was an intended union with God, symbolised by the circle or globe, and she found many examples of this and other equipment used by the apothecary-alchemists as transformed by Bosch into properties of his Garden. Bernard Vermet added new information to the dating of the artist’s paintings, primarily from the standpoint of “dendrochronological” testing (of growth rings of the wooden panels on which they were painted) done by contemporary scientists. Among the controversial findings that he and Koldeweij contributed, or reported, was that The Marriage at Cana was produced at least half a century after the artist’s death. As an example of a talented follower, Vermet told that the Spaniard Felipe de Guevara wrote around 1560 of a highly accomplished pupil of Bosch’s who could outdo his master in imitating him and signing works in his name, also that frequent retouching of Bosch’s paintings after his death made technical comparisons very problematic. This historian made a thorough survey of the remainder of Bosch’s paintings, detailing the new proposals on the dating or authenticity of the artist’s work. Paul Vandenbroeck showed how Bosch used Christ and angels to balance the negative in his work.

Christ might seem to despair when he displays his wounds to the sinful mass below, but in doing so, “he draws attention to his suffering, through which he will save the humanity that has forgotten its God”. The author concluded that Bosch was deeply imbedded in the urban, bourgeois culture that surrounded him but became wealthy enough by his work to separate himself from the “artistic norms of his time”. He had summed up his independence by appending a Latin quotation (possibly from Boethius) to one of his drawings: “It is characteristic of the most dismal of minds always to use clichés and never their own inventions”. Reading all of these excellent studies, one cannot help but wonder, however, if any have found “the wisdom of the riddle” (part of the title of Vandenbroeck’s essay). Perhaps, this is because there is not one answer, but many. Gibson told that some writers, beginning with Leo van Puyvelde, suggested that Bosch might not have had a specific meaning in mind for each of his images, but was allowing his imagination its own freedom. Furthermore, Gibson continued:

For Puyvelde, too, a humorous element can be discerned in much of his art, even in his depictions of monsters. Admittedly we are far from Lampsonius’ evocation of a fearful artist haunted by the very devils he painted, but in other respects this emphasis on Bosch’s inventive fantasy recalls the conception of the artist as a faiseur de dyables current in the 16th century and long after.

It is into this category that I cast the theory that follows.

The Hay Wagon (right panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 135 x 45.1 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Hay Wagon (detail, right panel), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.