Fränger’s Thesis (Epiphanies and Absurdities

Wilhelm Fränger began his study of Hieronymus Bosch and his work by deploring the “vulgar misunderstanding” to which the master had been subjected by having his work passed off as mere mummery. Fränger insisted that, with Bosch, symbols “entail a perfect simultaneity of vision and thought” and must be treated as such. The writer considered all other approaches as “fragmentary”, thus presented his study as a total view.

In order to understand why the painter would create a mute symbolism, the art historian sorted through the whole body of paintings, separating those of enigmatic content from those that contain little or none. Only if the “freakish riddles” on which Bosch’s reputation was founded occurred in all of the paintings could they be called “the irresponsible phantasmagoria of an ecstatic”. Fränger found that the deviant content existed only in a clearly defined group of altarpieces – the three large triptychs of the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Lisbon Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the Hay Wagon. In contrast, there was only a small amount of this symbolism in such paintings as the Epiphany triptych in the Prado and the Venice Martyrdom of Saint Julia. The remaining paintings, including those of the Passion and Adoration of the Magi themes, had little or none. He concluded, therefore, that an arbitrary distinction could be made between two main groups – the generally traditional, obviously created for the church, and the nontraditional, disparate ones.

Fränger concentrated on the second group, proposing that they could not have been made for a church congregation since they contained anti-clerical polemic implied by monks and nuns depicted behaving in a scandalous manner. Nor could these altarpieces have been made for pagan worship, since they also attacked pagan “priests” and their ritualistic excesses. Altarpieces, however, pointed to some kind of devotional patronage. The principal targets of their attacks point to a group of paintings outside the domain of the church, at once inveighing against ecclesiastical offences and at the same time fighting the abundant mysterious cults of the period. The only kind of society that could possibly answer the problem, according to Fränger, would be a militant heretical sect. Setting up an ideal contrary to the teachings of the Church, such a sect would be forced to fight the all-powerful tradition, but on the other hand, would find pagan abominations equally abhorrent. If Bosch should paint a devotional altarpiece for a society of this kind, he would mirror their “dual warfare, with all its polar tension” and his “eccentricities” would be explained.

According to the scholar, all previous interpretations of Bosch erred that did not approach his symbolism with this frame of reference. Because Bosch was not intelligible to them, most commentators assumed that he had not intended to communicate – and that

Triptych of the Martyrdom of St Liberata, 1500-1504. Oil on panel, 104 x 119 cm. Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), c. 1490-1500. Oil on oak, 73.5 x 59.1 cm. The National Gallery, London. the creatures he let loose in these paintings were mere “phantoms of hell”. This thinking placed an emphasis on the hell scenes that Bosch might not have intended. True, there are scenes which are set in the most horrific of all hells, but they are always balanced on the other side of the altarpiece by “an impeccable anchorite, or by Mount Ararat, or by the Garden of Eden”. In other words, if Bosch gave equal weight to the opposed “ideal scenes”, could we not assume that he intended to emphasise these scenes by their very contrast with hell? This added further weight to Fränger’s theory of the heretical sect, because Bosch’s more positive scenes would reflect the idealism of such a society.

The author believed that one of the most widely misinterpreted of Bosch’s paintings was The Garden of Earthly Delightstriptych. In fact, he concentrated the remainder of his study of Bosch’s ideation upon a new interpretation of this painting. The reason for the confusion, he thought, was that it had for centuries been thoughtlessly associated with another of more obvious message, the Hay Wagon. Both triptychs have flanking panels of a Garden of Eden scene on the left and a hell scene on the right – thus, the message was assumed to be much the same1. Fränger saw many differences, however, that would belie the dual association. The Eden panel (p. 58) of the Hay Wagon contains sequences of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Creation of Eve (p. 60), the Temptation (p. 63), and the Expulsion from the Garden which are placed on a vertical axis in the same garden landscape. The grouping is traditional, but there is some Boschian originality in their presentation, as the “rebel angels” are presented as insects falling in swarms from heaven and there is a peculiar rock formation at the site of the Creation of Eve, presaging the even stranger ones to be seen in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nevertheless, little to be found in this panel is incomprehensible. The central painting (p. 90), now supposed to be an illustration of the Flemish proverb: “the world is a haystack; everyone takes what he can grab thereof”, is dominated by a gigantic hay wagon which, according to Jacques Combe:

Evok[es] at the same time the late Gothic motive of the procession of pageant, and the Renaissance Triumph … drawn by semi-human, semi-animal monsters and headed straight for hell, followed by a cavalcade of ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries. From all sides of the wagon men scramble over one another to pull hay from the giant stack. The only heed they take of their fellows is to thrust them out of their way or to raise hands against them. One sticks a knife into the throat of the unfortunate competitor whom he has pinned to the ground.

Many among the greedy mob wear ecclesiastical garb, indicating Bosch’s attitude that the holy as well as profane are involved in this scavenging. A fat monk sits in a large chair and lazily sips a drink while several nuns do service for him, packing bundles of hay into the bag at his feet. One of his nuns turns to the lure of sexual enticement symbolised by the fool playing a bagpipe, to whom she offers a handful of hay in hopes of winning his favours.

The clergy seem to be in the majority among the wicked brought under Bosch’s scathing attack in this altarpiece, but there are others, too, of the devil’s earthly disciples.

There is a quack toothpuller whose hay-filled pocket refers to the fees that have “lined his pockets”, garnered as they are from the gullible populace. There are gypsies, women and children, figures always suspect as servitors of Satan and a blind beggar led by a child to his share of the spoils. Two idling lovers embrace on top of the hay pile while two others enjoy the delights of music, played for their pleasure by a troubadour-demon who fingers his own pipe-shaped snout. All are caught in a snare laid by Satan and ignore the angel who implores them to look to heaven for their souls’ sake. Above them, an image of Christ in the clouds shows to a heedless mankind the signs of His martyrdom on earth – His stigmata. The scene is obviously an allegory of man’s sins on earth which foretell his inevitable progress into hell. The monsters that draw him there administer tortures designed for each of his sins.

The hell scene of this triptych is as unusual in presentation as the Eden scene is traditional, demonstrating all of the master’s skills of painting and designing unusual torments. A flaming sky lights up the windows of a furnace in which can be seen figures engaged in demonic activity. Arms and legs protrude from a lake coloured by the glow and heat of the sky. In the foreground are the sinners just received into hell. Stripped bare, they are submitting passively to their individual punishments. Unusual in this scene is the construction work underway in the middle of the setting as if it were necessary to construct more torture chambers for the expected influx of sinners already crowding in from the fracas at the hay-wagon. This altarpiece contains some symbolism of an obscure nature, but there is not the overwhelming amount to be found in the Earthly Delightsand the large Saint Anthony.Even Fränger is in agreement with the other writers that this triptych depicts the stigma of the original sin under which man is born and by which his course is set through life to its dénouement in hell. The cryptic symbolism does not obscure the main theme, fairly direct in presentation, so there is naturally more unanimity of opinion concerning the message of this altarpiece.

Such is not the case with The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Eden panel of this painting is not a setting for several traditional events concerning Adam and Eve. They are seen only once, Adam sitting and Eve kneeling on either side of the Lord. The group is placed on a lawn between two pools, from which crawl hybrid animals engaged in bizarre activities. A fountain in the centre or the middle pool and a rock structure in the upper background appear to have become organic and grown to their odd conformations. There is an entire apple grove behind the Creatorand Created, but no tree seems to be as distinguished as the Tree of Life – this must be the palm-like tree to the side of Adam. Its leaves are shaped like coins, their weight causing the tendrils to sway in awkward heaviness. The forbidden fruit must be the enlarged berries which droop from the vine curling about the trunk.

The central scene seems to be set in the same kind of landscape, but its plants have rigidified like minerals and its mineral structures grown like plants.

This land is overwhelmed with human and animal beings, fairly normal in their appearances although abnormal in their relative sizes. The humans are well-proportioned nudes that diminish in size according to the laws of perspective, but the animals, although

Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1480-1490. Oil on wood, 57 x 32 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Christ Carrying the Cross. Oil on panel, 150 x 94 cm. Palacio Real, Madrid. appearing normal when seen separately, are not always relative to the humans in size –sometimes entirely dwarfing them. Nor are their colours or activities proper to their biological requirements. The activities of the humans, as they eat upon oversized fruits, or engage in erotic play, have caused writers from the time of Father José de Següenza to believe this to be a testament to the deadly sin of lust, or “luxuria”. In the words of arthistorian Lotte Brand Phillip:

Yet, in the belief of the Middle Ages, all sins and vices are interwoven and one derives from the other. Therefore, it is not only ‘luxuria’ which is depicted here but all the sins brought forth by this vice and all the vices which cause ‘luxuria’. This is quite evident in the right wing which, in a horrifying inferno, presents the punishment of all kinds of sins.

The hell scene of this altarpiece is Bosch’s diabolic masterpiece. Throughout its far reaches, sinners are being tortured in a night-lit landscape that is so marvellously painted as to be a work of genius. This scene is dominated by a wondrous egg-tree monster that floats upon the inky water on two boat feet from which tree-trunk legs are sprouting (p. 97). The body of this creature is a cracked-open egg-shell that serves as a tavern interior that its occupants must have reached by a ladder from the water below. Attached to the top of the egg is a hat on which a procession of nudes paired with demons parades around a large pink bagpipe, symbolic of lust. Around and below the egg-man are areas of hell where sinners of various professions (knights, monks, musicians, gamblers, etc.) undergo excruciatingly appropriate tortures in a visualisation unequalled in art history for its inventiveness.

Comparing these two triptychs, Fränger saw at least five arguments which would oppose the association of the two in the Hay Wagon’s obvious theme: creation – sinful-life – hell. “First of all, there is the basic difference in breaks and coherences”, said the historian. In the Hay Wagon, a break in continuity occurs between the Garden of Eden panel and the middle panel, and there is decided coherence between the centre scene and Hell. This can be seen in the fact that the hybrid creatures pulling the wagon into hell from the middle panel are obviously minions of Satan; their parade continues with no break into hell. In the Earthly Delights, no such separation exists between the Garden of Eden panel and the central one, but a continuity of landscape from one into the other. This difference in continuities in the two works indicated to Fränger that Bosch intended a different idea in the two, and it should not be assumed that just because the scene following the Garden in the Hay Wagon represents wickedness, the corresponding scene of EarthlyDelights automatically does the same.

As his second argument, Fränger pointed out that the nude creatures disporting themselves in the central panel of Earthly Delightsare not doing so in what has appeared to all others besides him to be wanton display, instead they “are peacefully frolicking about the tranquil garden in vegetative innocence, at one with animals and plants, and the sexuality that inspires them appears to be pure joy, pure bliss”. Thirdly, Fränger argued that although the hell scene is divided into areas of torture for sinners among the knights,

the religious orders, the musicians, and the gamblers, “not a single adept of carnal love” is being tortured.

If Bosch were holding up the sin of lust to reproach, asked Fränger, would he not in a logical sequence conclude with its punishment in hell? In the case of the Hay Wagon, the greedy are not only to be found in their state of eternal damnation in hell – but also, the demons of hell swarm into the world of the central panel to assist in drawing the wagon all the faster in its fateful course. Here again, the writer refuted one of the parallelisms that had been too closely drawn. The author cited the situation in the Paradise panels for his fourth argument: the Eden of the Earthly Delights contains no sign of conflict as in that of the other triptych. Not only is there evidence of the primal conflict in the Hay Wagon’s rout of the wicked angels from heaven (transformed as they are by Bosch’s inventiveness into those marvellous insect forms but also, testimony to original sin in the fact that Adam and Eve are being expelled by threat of the “fiery sword”. In the Earthly Delights, on the other hand, this scholar observed that Adam, Eve, and the Lord (in the form of the Son – a medieval transposition) are beheld in a moment of cosmic unity.

Fränger suggested later that the three are forming “a closed circuit, a complex of magical energy” by the physical contact between them. Adam’s feet touch the Creator’s, who in turn holds the hand of Eve. That is “himself (Christ) the image of God, he is the transmitter of this image to the two beings he has created, standing between them as their coeval”. This fact indicated to Fränger a positive and good estate, with no presentiment of the ultimate “fall”.

Continuing his line of defence, the historian suggested that since the children of Adam and Eve were born after the expulsion, it followed that the original pair were the only people in “Paradise”. Thus, the humans abounding there must represent their progeny, had Adam and Eve not fallen from grace.

Since the dogma of original sin and the Expulsion cannot be ignored if there were children, however, here is “a millennial condition that would arise if, after expiation of original sin, humanity were permitted to return to Paradise and to a state of tranquil harmony embracing all creation”.

Such a promise, Fränger believed, inhered in the symbolism contained on the outside of the triptych, seen when the panels are closed. This was his final argument, and to him, the most compelling. Almost covering the surface of both wings is the crystal sphere, containing a flat disk which cuts through its centre. (This idea of the aspect of the universe Bosch had taken from an ancient cosmology, said Fränger, not in currency in his time. Even if this were too early for Columbus’ discovery to have penetrated iconography, the earth had been depicted as being round for some time, generally as a small sphere concentrically set inside several larger spheres on which the fixed stars and the zodiacal signs were distributed.)

This must be, Fränger believed, the third day of Creation, that “’fruitful moment’ in the six days of Creation, the very moment when the first rain falls upon the yet barren earth, out of which the first trees and bushes are about to sprout”. Fränger believed that the awe-inspiring message of this Creation is made clear in the quotations from the Psalms,

Christ Carrying the Cross (detail). Oil on panel, 150 x 94 cm. Palacio Real, Madrid.

Christ Carrying the Cross (detail). Oil on panel, 150 x 94 cm. Palacio Real, Madrid. XXXIII and CXLVIII, placed along the upper edges of the panels and also, by God’s image, which appears above and to the left of the sphere: “For he spake and it was done,” and “He commanded and it stood fast.” The Lord, seated as on a heavenly throne, holds on His lap a book, symbolic of the “Word” which is becoming incarnate below. Fränger saw the throne as a prefiguration of the great world globe, for it seems to repeat the shape of the large crystal globe by being a miniature crystal enclosure. In reverse, God’s throne is repeated and realised in the larger cosmological symbol, which finds its fulfilment when the wings of the altarpiece are thrown open. “The great ball divides, and its ordered realms represented by the zones of heaven, earth, sea, and the underworld, are repeated in the corresponding zones of the Garden of Eden, the Millennial Paradise, and hell.”

Therefore, the scholar’s conclusion must be that the central section of the interior is an earthly paradise – the fulfilment of the Word of God with implicit positive, rather than negative intent. “After that solemn prelude in the crystal globe, the history of the world could not possibly gravitate towards a stew of defilement and hence into Hell.” Bosch has in this painting, Fränger said, sought to deny the dualism that was seen as existing between things of the flesh and things of God. In other words, he has tried to raise fleshly delights out of the realm of shame into which they had been deposed in traditional theology.

Fränger answered his own question as to the specific nature of a cult for which this altarpiece could have been painted by reasoning that, since Adam and Eve figure strongly in other prominent Netherlandish paintings – by Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling – it must have been an Adamite cult. This cult is known to have advocated the practice on earth of sinless perfection – a practice that could incorporate man’s physical desires by outlining an ideal physical relationship between the sexes – so attained, man could then return to the state of bliss which our progenitors had lost by their sin.

To Fränger, this explanation of a heretical cult resolved all conflicting elements. Even “the high pitched boundless frenzy” of the Earthly Delights hell scene would be explicable. Because a secret society must risk possible discovery and persecution, it would tend toward self-justification and would direct the terrors of hell toward others, not its own members. Because the members must flout established tradition, deep-rooted even in themselves, they would defend their society’s precepts all the more intensely. Obversely, they would deny its privileges to the uninitiated and would place the outsiders, not themselves, in hell.

For incontrovertible evidence of his theory, Fränger offered the record of a trial in the Episcopal court at Cambrai in 1411, which charged the Carmelite friar, Willem van Hildernissen, with heresy. This man was one of the leaders of the Homines Intelligentiae of Brussels, a radical branch of a religious movement active in the territory from the Rhineland to the Netherlands. Because of inferences, which Fränger made from certain statements in the trial record, he assured himself that this was the group for which Bosch produced his altarpiece. Its members called themselves “Brothers and Sisters of the Free (or High) Spirit” in the belief that they were the incarnation of the Holy Ghost and through its power exalted to a state of spirituality that was immune from sin even in the flesh, with

Child with a Walking Frame (reverse of Christ Carrying the Cross), c. 1480-1490. Oil on panel, diameter: 28 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1510-1516. Oil on panel, 76.7 x 83.5 cm. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.

its subjection to lusts, so that on earth they lived in a state of paradisiacal innocence”. He suggested first, however, that the group’s constitution rested upon a tenet of equality of the sexes that is implicit in its very name. Since “the word homines means ‘men’ in the general sense of ‘human beings’, which amounts to claiming for man a dignity that–since it is based on the fact that Adam was made in the image of God – admits no modification on the score of birth or class, rank or possessions … then the distinction between man and woman was also sublimated in the loftier concept of homo.”

This must mean, Fränger thought, that the female enjoyed equal status with man in this society, and if she were thus exalted in position over the inferiority accorded her by the church, she must have lost her denigration as the “sinful vessel”. As to what this implies of the beliefs or activities of these men and women within the society, the writer answered by turning to the Cambrai record. One of the points of indictment stated:

Likewise they created among themselves a peculiar mode of discourse which they call the act of sexual union ‘the joy of Paradise’ or, by another name, ‘the way to the heights’ (acclivitas). And in this manner they speak of such a lustful act to others, who do not understand it, in a favourable sense.

From this statement, Fränger surmised that the cult’s second principle was that its members lived together according to high moral values. To these brethren, “the strictest sanctification of love” was the way by which they could reach human perfection; this estate they saw embodied in Adam and Eve, who were themselves made in the image of God’s divine perfection. The converse became the second principle; that because man is made in the image of God, he can only endure in this highest of all estates by the practice of a sublimated act of love. As to the nature of this act, Fränger saw in the court record two possible answers. To indicate one of them, he quoted the following portion: “Secondly, that the natural sexual act could take place in such a manner that it was equal in value to a prayer in the sight of God.”

In other words, it could mean the natural act so purified in the mind “that it should no longer be felt as a humiliating animal act, but as the expression of an exalting, divine, creative principle”. The scholar preferred to seek the clue in a statement pertaining to another leader of the Brethren (a man who was being tried posthumously), that “he exercises a special mode of sexual intercourse, yet not contrary to Nature, of which he says it was that of Adam in Paradise”. If this “special mode” refers to an act distinct from the animal one, “yet not contrary to nature”, then it is clearly sinless, and could be practiced in perfect innocence – providing pure pleasure not befouled by any sense of shame. In this statement, thought the writer, lay the real meaning of the Earthly Delights centre section. It was an illustration of this “special mode” of sexual play, the “immortal expression to this Adamite eroticism”, that was revealed in the painting, not directly, but secreted in a mesh of symbolic communications. Having brought us to this conclusion, Fränger proceeded to his prime purpose – that of translating “this Free Spirit ars amandi out of the secret code of symbolism into generally comprehensible language”.

Ecce Homo, 1475-1480. Tempera and oil on oak, 71 x 61 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

Ecce Homo, c. 1450-1516. Oil and gold on panel, 52.1 x 54 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

This is enough of Fränger’s argument to illustrate the nature of his interpretation and his characteristic mode of thought – a thoroughly rational, in fact, brilliantly logical analysis which on the surface was exceedingly convincing. Upon more careful scrutiny, however, it was the scholar’s logic, not Bosch’s, that he revealed. What Fränger consistently did here was to follow a system of reasoning that set up a hypothesis as an arbitrary starting point and then, through misleading inferences, arrived at subsequent hypotheses and developed the conclusions implicit in them, ad infinitum. A construction of thought was created, no portion of which could be removed without damage to the whole, nor explained without reference to the whole. But the entire structure rested upon the original hypothesis, a very shaky foundation indeed.

This was Fränger’s hypothesis: that the paintings containing the major part of Bosch’s enigmatic symbolism, being in the form of altarpieces, must have been made for a devotional purpose. They contain anticlerical and anti-pagan invective that could have been made neither for the Church nor for a pagan group. An example of the anticlerical has already been shown in the fat monk being served by his nuns in the Hay Wagon. Another is in the pig wearing a nun’s wimple and veil soliciting the affections of a man in the Hell scene of the Garden. Since it was not the practice of a late medieval artist to paint merely for his own satisfaction, nor is it conceivable that private commissioners would have wanted such odd altarpieces for their own chapels, then there must have been a group outside the Church, operating between its severe discipline and pagan anarchy, but fighting both. These paintings must have been made for a heretical sect, therefore, which was forced to hide its ideas in secret symbols whose explanations would clarify Bosch’s enigmatic figures. To Fränger, this meant without question the Adamite cult.

Are the points of the hypothesis defensible? The fact of the traditional altarpiece form strongly implied to the historian a devotional purpose – therefore, he had to seek the type of group, which would use Bosch’s altarpieces for such a purpose. It is not absolutely necessary, however, to think of these paintings as having a devotional purpose. This was not a time of strict adherence to tradition. Northern Europe at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries was in a period of great transition.

Already, the influence of the Renaissance from the South had been felt, entailing a discard of many old forms and ways. There was a growing secularisation, resulting in a patronage for artists widened far beyond the extent of the Church. It is conceivable that the altarpiece form could have been used for a non-devotional painting commissioned by a private patron – merely because it allowed for intriguing complexity. But why could these paintings not have had a devotional purpose for this private patron – or for the Church, for that matter? It is the symbols of the pagan cults, which Fränger called signs of “swampy procreation and ritual promiscuity” that he did not believe could have been shown on church altars. Perhaps they could not be shown on our church altars, but in that time of less tender sensibility, evil practices of all kinds were denounced in descriptive detail from the very pulpits. In fact, such practices are denounced even today from fundamentalist Protestant pulpits.

Fränger pointed out that Bosch’s altarpieces always present an ideal content to balance the evil. Perhaps this would have justified their use as devotional altar paintings. If the worshipper would reflect upon the ideal scene (for instance, of a saint who remained faithful even in the face of all the forces of evil that Satan could bring to bear on him), he would be prepared to renounce his evil ways. As an added bit of goad, his possible future in hell was cast – in case he paid no heed to the admonishment.

Fränger previously placed Bosch’s paintings on the theme of passion and those on the Adoration of the Child into a group distinct from the controversial altarpieces – calling those paintings “straightforward, intelligible, and traditional”. It is well known that these paintings also exhibit many instances of evil workings in the world. Especially in his Passions, the painter gave the most hideous aspect to the ordinary humanity that crucified Christ. This group cannot be completely divorced from the large triptychs Fränger discussed. Perhaps the interpretation given the large triptychs by Father José de Següenza should be reconsidered in spite of Fränger’s elaborate argument to the contrary. Següenza was the first interpreter of the Earthly Delightspainting according to an association with the Hay Wagon. He saw both of these triptychs as containing the same idea incipient in Bosch’s earlier works – that wicked blind humanity would not heed the lessons of the Christian faith, but would indulge in a sinful life in a world that must surely end in hell.

One of the contentions upon which Fränger based his divergent interpretation of the Earthly Delights was that Bosch’s early and late works could not be closely associated. Since the earlier ones were more straightforward than the later ones, there must be a special meaning for the covert symbolism of the latter. The scholar did not believe, in addition, that the same intentions should inevitably be read into any two of the paintings, for instance – the late Earthly Delights and the earlier Hay Wagon. If one could find reasons to belie the dual association of these paintings, it could be said that the message of the first painting was positive rather than negative. There evidently no clean break between the contents and message of his early and late works – nor between that of the two works in question – rather an elaboration of the same message; therefore, this position of the author’s cannot be considered tenable.

If the large triptych paintings are seen as carrying on the same ideas contained in Bosch’s earlier works, it would seem that if any of the paintings was suitable to place before a worshipping body in the Church, these could have had their place at the altar, too. It would not, then, be necessary to look for a patron outside the church to justify their existence. But Fränger discarded the possibility of there being a private individual who would commission the work for his own home chapel too quickly. Even if such an individual did not have so serious or specific a purpose for the altarpiece as an addendum to a private chapel, he might have commissioned a Bosch painting merely because it was fascinating in itself.

The artist’s popular appeal is shown by the fact that his manner and subject treatments were adopted so quickly by artists such as Huys and Bruegel. It may be that Bosch painted for a delighted audience, only too happy to keep him in commissions. We know from records quoted above that he was held in repute by his fellow townsmen. We know,

Crucifixion with a Donor, c. 1490. Oil on panel, 74.7 x 61 cm. Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1470-1475. Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 x 56.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. too, that both the Emperor Charles V and one of his courtiers, Felipe de Guevara, had acquired several of Bosch’s paintings within a remarkably short time after the painter’s death. The fact that Charles’ son Philip confiscated one altarpiece from a rebellious Netherlandish Burgher makes it seem more likely that some paintings were owned privately rather than being part of the sacred equipment of churches; but it suggests as even less of a likelihood that the paintings were the hidden and guarded property of heretical sects. If such were the case, it is improbable that the paintings would have been in free circulation at such an early time after the artist’s death.

Fränger’s system of reasoning is so tightly constructed, with so little possibility of error that he seems to assume that mass intelligence would inevitably reach the same conclusions – once he had cleared away a few obstacles and pointed the direction, that is. One example will suffice to show to what fantastic excesses such thinking can and does lead in this interpretation. Fränger had previously demonstrated in his analysis of the central panel of Earthly Delights his belief that this fabulous display of erotic activity was in celebration of an actual marriage event. Therefore, he assumed that this also became the occasion for a pictorial revelation of the “society’s” mysteries – including all of the levels of knowledge members could attain by instruction and by which they could finally reach full association in the group. Since he thought the painting such a “unique pictorial creation, in which the whole universe has been assembled to sing praises such as no king and queen ever heard on their wedding day”, it must be a truly “god-like couple” who are being married; Fränger went on to find them in the lower right corner of the panel, half-hidden in a cave. The man is the only clothed figure among the abounding nude ones, he said, and proposed further differentiations as well.

A man who exalts himself by such self-awareness as this one exhibits, and who is further being exalted by such a wedding celebration, could be one of only two people to Fränger – either the painter Bosch, or the man who inspired the triptych. Since this is not a portrait of Bosch, it must be according to the writer:

The face of the man who commissioned such an extraordinary work of art and inspired its intellectual conception, [and] we can go even further and make the conjecture that this portrayal of the bridegroom is also that of the Grand Master of the Free Spirit, who meets us with a piercing, scrutinising gaze on the threshold of his paradisiacal world.

Having established the leader’s identity and personality from this “evidence” of the painting, Fränger asserted other instances in which his invention revealed himself. The author saw his face in that of the egg-tree monster placed in the centre of hell as if to demonstrate allegorically a basic doctrine of the cult – that one must make a public confession of sin before being able to return to a “state of purity”. Because a crow can be seen near the man’s “portrait”, Fränger believed this to be his symbol; therefore, wherever there was a crow (as at Adam’s feet in the Garden of Eden), there was the “Grand Master” participating in a cosmic event important to the whole revelation.

Fränger understood the cave of the bride and bridegroom not only to symbolise the consummation of their marriage, soon to take place, but the tie-in with Neo-Pythagorean philosophy, since caves had figured strongly in the history of Pythagorianism. The scholar’s purpose in making these Italian connections was obviously to justify finding such an esoteric community in the North as is known to have existed in Renaissance Italy. (Fränger had stated earlier, when first introducing the idea of the Adamite cult, that it was of particular importance in the early Renaissance period when: “Ideas of Platonic, Augustinian, NeoPythagorean, and Gnostic origin fused to form an attitude that saw Original man as the archetype of spiritual renewal and hence of a pure, free state of human life.”)

To explain his cult’s mysteries according to those of the Italian societies, and their appearance in this Netherlandish cult, Fränger had to introduce the “Grand Master” and show cause for this man’s having brought these ideas back from his own schooling days in Italy – thus the author’s assertion that the man has the look of an Italian intellectual and the further strengthening point that the woman behind him (his “bride”) has Italian colouring and features. Having so thoroughly convinced himself of his assertions, Fränger introduced the elusive “Grand Master” into “early Dutch social and art history [as] a powerful spiritual personality, hitherto completely unknown, one who is worthy to rank with those three great men of the same country and the same century, Erasmus Desiderius of Rotterdam, Johannes Secundus, and Johannes Baptist van Helmont”. Thus, Fränger not only endowed his invention with physical aspect, personality, bride, and philosophy, but he bestowed greatness on him. In the process, he destroyed Bosch not only as a personality but also as an artist.

He did this first by declaring that the altarpiece’s symbolism was a “system of sexualethical teachings, in which the pictorial motifs were didactic symbols, clear reflections of Renaissance natural philosophy, and hence patterns of a modern intellectual kind, pointing towards the future”. The author’s more devastating conclusion was that since there was a personality behind the painter’s inventions, his “pictorial ideas were not his own at all, but were laid down for him by a mentor of encyclopaedic erudition, with an exquisite sense of detail, yet capable of planning on a magnificent scale and imperturbably sure of his purpose”.

It was not merely subject matter dictation that Fränger believed Bosch had received, but that the “mentor” had even designed the colour and formal composition. He had obviously designed the colour because it bears symbolic relationship in every instance to the idea involved, but he strongly influenced the composition by allowing Bosch to break with his previous practice of placing dominant ideas along the axes of the panels, as in the two “Paradise-panels”, and to disorganise the hell scene in a manner planned as a symbolic reverse of the very order of the other two “worlds”.

Fränger seemed to believe that such systematic disorganisation grew out of a profound understanding of the destructive forces of society that could only belong to a man “who had the ideal image of creative harmony steadily before his inner eye”. It indicated that “the inspirer extended his influence even to the very realm of motifs and forms that have hitherto been regarded as Bosch’s own private territory as ‘faizeur de dyables’; and

The Adoration of the Magi (detail), c. 1470-1475. Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 x 56.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Adoration of the Magi (detail), c. 1470-1475. Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 x 56.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. hence the painter’s own created world seems on the point of vanishing”. The scholar went on to push Bosch over the edge with his next words:

[If] we have to ascribe even the painter’s most peculiar originality to a mentor, it seems as though his own share in the achievement must sink to that of a craftsman, no matter how highly qualified, merely executing somebody else’s orders … it might have been more logical to devote all our energies to working out the personality of the real spiritual creator and – leaving Bosch on one side – to reinstate the actual origination of this profound work.

At this point, Fränger did admit that “such a strictly logical process would reduce itself to absurdity, since it would be impossible to reconcile it with the visual data of the picture itself, which, in spite of the guidance to which the painter was subject, blossoms out in complete pictorial freedom”.

The Adoration of the Magi (detail), c. 1470-1475. Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 x 56.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

He had to assume that “the mentor and his disciple were in such complete harmony that the gap between command and obedience, demand and fulfilment, was not merely bridged but filled by such a mutual understanding and sense of responsibility that the result could be a joyful cooperation in creating a ‘work of true community’, [achieved, of course, by] the unconditional submission that Bosch made to his mentor’s directions [and that] won him the immeasurable reward of the Grand Master’s trust, confidence, and encouragement”. The historian continued to give examples, cited from the “evidence” of the painting, of the type of esoteric instruction that the “Grand Master” gave to his “pupil”. No matter how much Fränger might protest that all this did not reduce Bosch’s stature to that of “a craftsman, no matter how highly qualified, merely executing somebody else’s orders”, that is exactly what happened. He went further yet, knocking the props from under Bosch’s autonomous identity as a technician as well as a “mind”. Even the painter’s superb technical achievements in the Earthly Delights, the historian said, resulted from the painter’s association with the “mentor”. This man apparently gave constant prompting to Bosch to observe nature so closely that he could give magical significance to every object, animate and inanimate, by making it radiate a very energy through its “profoundly understood” form. From “all the ceaseless observations that Bosch had to carry out in

Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, The Mystic Lamb (exterior view), 1427-1432. Oil on panel, 375 x 320 cm. Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent.

The Hay Wagon (triptych), 1525. Oil on panel, 140 x 200 cm. Monastery of San Lorenzo, Escorial. (above; pp. 56-57)

preparing to paint this picture he gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ‘realia’ of life, as a result of which he was far ahead of all other painters of his time.”

What about Bosch’s earlier achievements – are they now accountable without this spectral “mentor”? Of course not – except that Fränger rushes in to fill this loophole:

It was solely as a result of his co-operation with this deeply experienced and determined mentor that Hieronymus van Aken came to maturity as a man and achieved true mastery as a painter. Gifts that were latent in him, such as his skill in realistic representation, were widened and deepened; and spiritual potentialities, of which he hardly dreamed, such as his spiritual power of penetration, were developed by planned exercises.

Furthermore, Fränger indicated that he planned to follow up this proposition with “two later volumes, which would contain chronological evidence of the co-operation of these two men, from the early Conjurer to the final Adoration of the Child”. Then, to cap the climax, he demonstrated how the Earthly Delightspainting gave its own proof that Bosch knew how much he owed to the “Grand Master”. The painter is supposed to have placed his portrait “beside the Pythagorean cave, looking out of the narrow space between the naked nun’s profile and the face of the Johannine youth”, at a respectful distance from that of the “master”.

This modest positioning indicated several interesting things to Fränger: that since Bosch had depicted himself as an equal in the midst of those who were admitted into “Paradise”, he must have been a member of the Community of the Free Spirit. Furthermore, this “act of self-restraint” on the artist’s part indicated a moral attitude of self-abnegation – thus, selfdiscipline, which (since this is the attitude of one of the “members”, must be that of all) threw a different light on the Free Spirit group’s “much slandered morality”. Obviously, the cult’s practice must be of the highest moral order and not an anarchic degeneracy, as had been generally believed. As a final fillip to exalt his “society”, Fränger spoke of the painting as “a work that represented the community’s world of ideas so completely and comprehensively that the loss of the writings of the Free Spirit sect seems compensated for by this pictorial document”. We must conclude that the author’s imagination is only rivalled by that of Hieronymus, himself. It is too bad that Fränger’s original high purpose of reestablishing Bosch as an artist through a proper evaluation of his work devolved into the realm of the nonsensical – that the only means by which he could make Bosch palatable was to prove that the painter’s ideas were not his own at all.

It seems to this writer that Wilhelm Fränger’s interpretation of Bosch’s Earthly Delights (his “Millennium”) was the watershed in both Fränger’s efforts to interpret the artist and those of the historians who came after him. This is because, having “discovered” the Grand Master of the Community of the Free Spirit, Fränger continued to “find” him (or his influence) in several of Bosch’s other paintings. Moreover, his arguments were so compelling and presented so colourfully, many historians who followed him reacted for or against his interpretation. Let us review, cursorily, this historian’s further discoveries as well as several other vivid attempts at interpreting this intriguing and masterful artist.

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