A More Prosaic View

From the various discussions reviewed it would appear that there is still much disagreement concerning Hieronymus Bosch. Was this man mad or was he completely sane? Were these paintings the result of hallucinatory behaviour or were they the transmissions of completely rationalised formulae? Would not either of these extreme points of view nullify the man’s achievements as an artist? If he were insane, would his paintings be more than irresponsible products of interest primarily to a psychologist? If he were the transcriber of a cult’s sign language, would he then be any more than a distinguished craftsman?

It seems to this writer that Wilhelm Fränger was on the right track when he began his study by attributing the confusion concerning Bosch to the historians who had approached the paintings from content alone. They considered the imagery, in Fränger’s words, “at best as illustration, i.e. as a pictorial representation subordinated to a ready-made idea, and never as a piece of imaginative creation in its own right, i.e. a pictorial realisation of a meaning”. It is interesting to note that Lotte Brand Phillips posited a similar idea in her article on Bosch’s Adoration of the Magi (p. 49), when she wrote that “it happens frequently in the art of Jerome Bosch that ideas taken from different contexts are amalgamated and find their expression in one single visual symbol.” (Prado, 274).

Fränger also made an excellent point when he implied that the imagery should be considered as “imaginative creation in its own right”, but with his next words he subverted that definition. If the imagery is to be considered the “pictorial realisation of a meaning,” then it cannot be considered “imaginative creation in its own right”, for the word “meaning” implies an idea or association outside itself against which the pictorial image should be judged. Of course, the historian whose only concern is the outside meaning and not the pictorial image would be making a mistake. The formalist, looking only at the image with no thought to the meaning, would also make too limited a study. Even Fränger would have subordinated the image to the meaning. To explain, let us examine his further statement that: “Symbols are not a mere combination of distinct forms and ideas, they entail a perfect simultaneity of vision and thought”. This may be very true, but a visual symbol formed by this “simultaneity” cannot then be completely explained verbally, because it no longer exists solely in the realm of thought content; it is something new – in other words, “imaginative creation in its own right”.

Fränger’s mistake was in not allowing these images to exist in their own right. He considered that whenever Bosch fused vision and thought to make an image, this image then embodied a new thought content which could be rationalised in verbal terms. His rationalisation led him to explain each image as having a precise relationship to the ritual formula of a cult. Actually, the scholar was studying the meaning, which he read into Bosch’s intention, and not the image for its own sake.

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

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

The Hay Wagon (exterior), 1525. Oil on panel, 147 x 212 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. We can certainly admit the importance of ideas as a necessary element of Bosch’s paintings – that is, the ideas from which he received inspiration and the total idea to which he related each painting. But the individual images within a painting do not necessarily have ideational meaning except as they relate to the total conception. They are creations forged during an artistic process, and should be considered as such. To judge them according to rational, exterior, content only compounds the confusion concerning Bosch. The images resulting from his creative activity are not rational structures in themselves. To look for rational meaning in them only leads to the kind of misunderstanding that has been rampant in the nearly five centuries since the painter’s death.

The historian stated the ingredient necessary to alleviate this misunderstanding when he said that “no one has yet penetrated to the core of the problem, mainly to Bosch’s mode of visual thought”. It is obvious, though, that the phrase meant something quite different to Fränger than the meaning it shall be given here. Before re-establishing Bosch’s position as an artist by discussing his “mode of visual thought” as the process by which he created his marvellous imagery, we shall consider the conditioning influences that must have directed his use of an unusual formula. This is because no artist, not even a unique one, develops autonomously. The growth of an artist like Bosch is the result of a combination of unusual circumstances influential in his background.

Hieronymus Bosch was certainly not closely allied to any school or group of artists. As a result, he did not follow the artist’s usual pattern of seeking to advance technical knowledge for its own sake, even within the framework of religious subject matter. Although he developed into a first-rate technician, nevertheless, it is apparent that his technical achievements evolved from the demands of religious necessity. He was, undoubtedly, intensely religious. His paintings exude belief of an extraordinary nature. The fact that his governing drive was the desire to heighten religious experience would be a prime factor in his freedom from the ordinary artistic restrictions. His lack of preoccupation with reality has made him incomprehensible to the layman and

The Hay Wagon (exterior), 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.

The Ship of Fools, between 1490 and 1510. Oil on panel, 58 x 33 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. historian alike, but this would naturally follow his desire to concretise such imaginary concepts as heaven, or hell, or the visions of a saint. His technical facility with such difficult passages as the cloud-formed tunnel to heaven, or the fire-lit night sky of hell would be the result of his wish to intensify the revelatory impact of these visions. There were many other factors at work in the formation of Bosch’s artistic modus. De Tolnay made the point that the artist’s very originality in technique and ideation may have resulted from his physical isolation from the main artistic currents of his time. There is no record of his ever having travelled outside of his hometown. If he had never seen the paintings of the great Flemish masters, his most immediate influences would be those found in a provincial town. The content of his paintings seems much closer to popular sources, such as illumination and incunabula, than to that of the Flemings. Although he worked in oil paint as they did, he did not employ their elaborate glazing method and, perhaps, had no knowledge of it. His was an alla prima technique, which some people believe to be his application to oils of a fresco painting manner, conceivably resulting from his admiration for the frescoes in the cathedral of ‘sHertogenbosch. Their ‘International Style’ figure treatment may explain the archaism of the figures in his early paintings.

An artist is never completely isolated from larger artistic heritages, however. Ideas are “in the air” and are bound to have their penetrative effect. He had a certain identity with Dutch art of his period. According to historian Otto Benesch:

Dutch art of the late 15th century, in spite of its tremendous height of pictorial mastership, had as its chief aim not perfection of craftsmanship and naturalistic observation of the Flemings, but expression. The same subjective religious spirit which brought about the mystical movements of the Brothers of the Common Life (the Ruysbroek followers) fills the works of the Dutch painters, whether they go in a realistic direction, like Geertgen tot Sint Jans, or in a fantastic and visionary one, like Bosch.

Benesch called this direction “Dutch Flamboyant Gothic”, but it was part of a movement of wider dispersion than this name would indicate. De Tolnay pointed out that there was a Neo-Gothic current spreading throughout Europe during the last quarter of the 15th century, appearing “simultaneously at Florence with Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, at Venice with Crivelli and Vivarini, in Germany with Schongauer, in Flanders itself with Juste de Gand”. Bosch’s involvement with Gothic art may have been more personal, however, than as a result of a generalised trend. The Cathedral of Saint John in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, is called one of the finest examples in the Netherlands of French Gothic architecture. It is known, as shown in records cited earlier, of Bosch’s close association with the cathedral, by virtue of his artistic contributions to its decoration. The cathedral had burned in the early part of the century, and the repairs were still in progress in the painter’s youth. He probably grew up watching the wood and stone carvers at work in the churchyard. The most obvious

result of such an observation was his love of the chimeras and grotesqueries that enjoy self-sufficient life in his works. A more important contribution of Gothic art to Bosch, however, lay in its mode of expression. Since the laws of Gothic art are determined by its own dynamics – not by the necessity of an adherence to nature’s laws – its influence allowed the artist his initial freedom from nature.

This type of expression was profoundly different from that of the Southern Renaissance, so soon to have the effect of inundating the Northern style. Southern European art was dominated by the intellect, Northern by the senses. The art of the South translated natural phenomena into ideas, thereby subordinating the world of nature to the mind of man. Northerners, more awed by the universal mysteries, placed themselves in the subordinate position to nature, and either recorded it literally, or “felt” it intuitively. Basically different intentions led to divergent style characteristics. Southern ideas were expressed in compositions involving a few large parts presented in a static, self-contained order. Northern compositions multiplied infinitely detailed parts to produce a complex, involved, unclear totality. Southern artists observed the “unities”, presenting a situation as it occurred in one time and place. Northerners often “narrated” in a literary fashion, projecting upon the same field several parts of a story as it occurred in different times and places. Scenes juxtaposed in this fashion do not observe natural, “visual”, logic but do partake of the resources of memory and imagination.

Southern art inherited from antiquity the ideal of beauty; its artists were inspired to pick, choose, correct, and perfect nature against their concept of its most ideal form. Northerners, lacking this noble idealism, could present the less attractive aspects of the world. They could include, even in a natural reference, the more terrible and extreme actions or attitudes, which do exist in human experience. Lastly, since human beings were paramount in their ideology, Southern artists could seek their measurements in their most ideal form.

Northerners, not holding humans and their bodily attributes inviolable, could depart from them if it suited their expressive purposes. They could distort the human body if they so desired – to whatever degree would serve their emotional needs. Or they could violate its requirements altogether in order to depict other worldly creatures in aberrant human and animal form, if this were their desire.

All of these Northern “differences” would conspire to condition a painter like Bosch. First, he would operate within the expressive, imaginative, spiritual realm of the Gothic. He would not be controlled by a reasoned adherence to visual logic as expressed in the classical compositional order, “unities”, perfect measurements, or ideal beauty. He would be allowed agility in imaginative realms from which he could pluck those marvellous creatures that he multiplied on his picture field – in disparate time and place positioning – of measurements and physical attributes emphatically unnatural and unbeautiful.

Some historians have believed that Bosch was not at all influenced by the great achievements of the 15th century, but was a complete reversion to Gothic, or “International Style”, or pre-Eyckien “archaism”. It was not possible for Bosch to have remained untouched by the artistic achievements of his own century. He was a master of illusionist

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, left panel: Paradise), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, left panel: Paradise), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. spatial recession, often applied more vertically than perpendicularly, but not achieved to such a degree in any previous century. He could indicate ephemeral effects, such as a smoke-filled sky, with startling effectiveness. Though not a naturalist in the sense of insisting on surface detail, a prime delight of the Flemings, he could differentiate textural substances. It has been emphasised that, from his Gothic influence, he would have felt it unnecessary to render the world’s logical, visual aspect, and so could deal freely in imaginative realms. It was just the skill that he possessed of rendering some natural effects, which he used in the service of his imagination that produced his peculiar identity. To be more inclusive, it was the combination of his knowledge of 15th-century achievements, Gothic ideation, his sectional and local provincial background, and his personal qualities of religiosity and imagination – all of which would contribute to the formation of this completely unique artistic personality.

The irrational element in Bosch’s paintings, one of the results of his distinctive motivations, is not a unique phenomenon in art. If the whole sweep of art history is considered, there have been many artists who have violated logic in their subject treatment, but they have not existed in sufficient number at any one time to form a school, until the past century. The manner in which they worked is consistent with a true understanding of the artistic process. We wonder that there have been so few of these artists, but when one realises the fate of Bosch in general opinion, the reason is clear. Few people are objective enough to separate the image from reality. This inability causes the lay observer to expect the image to retain the aspect of its counterpart in life and to assume, if it does not, that this disparity reflects the unbalanced mind of the artist.

Actually, whatever exists on a canvas, or drawing board, or in three-dimensional sculptured form – however much it partakes of life – is not and should not be judged as life itself. An artist, realising this initial independence of the art form from life, would seemingly have the right, if he or she so desired to deviate from life to any degree. Artists of the 20th century assumed this right, often departing from nature to the full degree of non-objectivism. But artists of earlier times were not able to cleave their work completely from nature. When they tried, their effort took the form of a break with nature’s consistent pattern. In other words, they would form hybrid creatures by combining animal and plant parts with human, or they would combine parts from various kinds of animals or even parts from inanimate objects. If they kept humans and animals intact, they would place them in unusual settings, give them unusual activities to perform, or make them disproportionate to one another in size.

It is conceivable that Bosch, believing the satanic world to be absent of everything normal, would create an abnormal world by making every creature a peculiar combination of disparate forms, engaged in extraordinary activities, in a setting of odd or unrecognisable conformation. To clarify this concept, let us cite some samples of these “irrational” art works. Of course, the hybrid creature is as old as art itself – the most notable examples in antiquity being the Sphinx and the Babylonian winged, humanheaded bull. This hybridisation can be found throughout the medieval period in the

creatures which adorn the borders of manuscript illuminations or which are carved over the cathedrals, from the tympana to the choir stalls. True to nature in the parts of their bodies which are taken from various known animals, these creatures are untrue in their entirety, and thus produce a bizarre, sometimes horrifying effect.

The same device was elaborated in the late Middle Ages by artists of graphic works. As Grillot de Givry described a 15th-century engraving by Israel van Meckenem:

Saint Anthony is shown lifted into the air by demons. The artist has borrowed the most grotesque and alarming anatomical peculiarities to be found in such animal forms as the oxyrhync, the decapods, and the cirripedes and built these demons out of them. There are fantastic holothurians with grimacing heads, mictyres with multiple claws, king-crabs flourishing a sharp sting. A rabid-featured monkey, armed with a cudgel, is beating the saint on the head with all his might. Other monsters are clinging to his robe. These have outspread fins, bristling spikes like those of the spondylus or the branchiopods, and the pointed crests of the dactylopters, the trigla, the flying hog-fish, or crab-beetles, along their spines.

Master E.S. made his devil in The Temptation of Christ into a hideous being of human stature and weirdly combined human and animal parts. Demonology was the most common motivation for such activity in this period; but often it was indulged merely to create delightful absurdities. In the alphabet series of the Master E.S., for instance, the artist formed letters by having apes, leopards, sloths, etc. hang onto one another. In his Battle of the Money Pots and Strong Boxes, Pieter Bruegel gave arms and legs to chests and pots so that they could carry weapons and indulge in violent warfare. To keep humans and animals intact, in themselves, but to make them perform unusual activities in disparate settings produced a more subtle effect. This was only a furtherance of the device of combining true parts to produce an untrue effect. For instance, the 16th-century Italian artist named Agostino Veneziano, in an engraving entitled The Carcass placed a procession of nude human beings in unusual attitudes. Some of them ride on goats; some pull the skeleton of a prehistoric beast on which others ride; some walk, but carry odd-sized babies on gigantic bones. This is probably a procession of witches on the way to a Sabbath, judging from the accoutrements such as goats, babies, bones, etc., which were significant in Sabbath rites. Witchcraft, like demonology, would be another subject matter field motivating artists to abnormal effects in their compositions.

Francisco Goya, an artist much at home in the realm of the irrational, derived several of the motifs for his Caprichos from witchcraft. Many of his half-human, half-animal creatures point to the transformation of witches into animals, before departing for the Sabbath. He often made humans perform bestial activities, or animals perform human activities, for the additional purpose of satirising human follies. In his later works, such as the Disparates, and Pinturas Negras, however, he used irrational images with no rational purpose in mind. To quote Aldous Huxley upon these works:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, central panel), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. In the Disparates the satire is on the whole less direct than in the Caprichos, the allegories are more general and more mysterious. Consider, for example, the technically astonishing plate, which shows a large family of three generations perched like huddling birds along a huge dead branch that projects into the utter vacancy of a dark sky. Obviously, much more is meant than meets the eye. But what? The question is one upon which the commentators have spent a great deal of ingenuity – spent it, one may suspect, in vain.

For the satire, it would seem, is not directed against this particular social evil or that political mistake, but rather against unregenerate human nature as such. It is a statement, in the form of an image, about life in general. Literature and the scriptures of all the great religions abound in such brief metaphorical verdicts on human destiny. Man, turns the wheel of sorrow, burns in the fire of craving, travels through a vale of tears, leads a life that is no better than a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

This is a beautifully worded statement and penetrating thought in that Huxley does not try to pinpoint the meaning of Goya’s Strange Folly etching. The idea that it is a “brief metaphorical verdict on human destiny” is wonderful, but is it really necessary to suppose that such an intention existed in Goya’s mind? He could simply have been employing the artist’s license to place human beings in a strange setting. The image would then exist in its own right; the viewer could read into it any desired meaning. Of course, to suggest that an artist like Goya was merely playing with forms on a plane surface when he juxtaposed them in strange relationships, is not to give a complete answer. The question would arise as to why these particular forms in these particular settings. Perhaps Huxley was on the right track when he said:

There are other plates in which the symbolism is less clear, the allegorical significance far from obvious … What is the meaning of these things?

Perhaps the answer to that question is that they have no meaning in any ordinary sense of the word; that they refer to strictly private events taking place on the obscurer levels of their creator’s mind.

If it is true that Goya was working according to subconscious suggestion, then he is allied on this score to the 20th-century Surrealists. These artists formed a school based on deriving inspiration from as yet unplumbed depths within the human mind. This they considered antidotal to the “forces of reason” which they thought responsible for war and the sham structure of society. The Surrealists studied their own dreams, focusing on the dream state incongruities of object positioning, and dislocations of time and space. They attempted, by juxtaposing incongruate, dislocated, and unreasonable settings and activities on a canvas, to recreate a dream state with its compelling and fascinating power on the observer.

There were two groups of early Surrealists, divided according to the means they employed: those who depicted the fantastic world in precisely photographic terms, and

those who used a spontaneous technique as well as subject matter. Artists of the first group desired to produce their fantasies in terms of a slick-surfaced photograph, so they would generate the same assurance of reality as in a snapshot. The technical methods of the first group closely resemble those of Hieronymus Bosch; thus, we might focus on one artist of this surrealist group, such as Salvador Dalí. Since he was very verbal about his artistic activity, it is possible to follow his thinking as he himself explained it. Dalí was far more objective about his painting activity than the earlier Surrealists.

They tried to subjugate reason altogether and place themselves in a simulated somnambulist state in order to be completely receptive to subconscious stimulation. This artist asserted, however, that he could make rational use of subconscious suggestion. He claimed to have a paranoiac personality that, in full awareness, he could place at the service of his reasoning intellect. The only difference between himself and a madman, he said, was that he was not mad but could induce a state of “madness” within which to operate in his creative activity. The process would work such as this: just as a person of true paranoid personality is consistently deluded as to the logical interpretation of reality, Dalí could delude his own interpretation of what he put upon a canvas. Having placed an image of one sort there, he could disassociate it from any contextual relationship –then let its form suggest another of completely different association, until he had filled a canvas in this way, The result of these unrelated forms would be as a new and disturbingly different world – haunting in that it would evoke a deep response in the observer. But, too deep for objective recognition, the result would be reminiscent of the shadowed memory of a dream.

Sometimes Dalí would allow another kind of delusion to take place. He would place an image on his canvas, and allow its form to suggest another that he would then paint within the first form – thus producing a double-image. This had often been done in the past – for instance, by the 16th-century Italian Mannerist, Arcimboldo.

Dalí would not always stop with one delusion. He would let the second image suggest another, paint that within it, and then repeat the process until he had produced triple and quadruple images. The possibilities were, of course, unlimited – the possibilities to the observer’s mind unlimited, as well. Sir Herbert Read discussed this process of forming the images as a kind of conscious dream formation. He said that the artist cannot explain the form that the image takes in its emergence on his canvas, but collects forms from other contexts, observed in the course of the day’s activities. They are held in the deep mind until it is necessary to call them up in the course of the actual painting process.

In other words, already peculiarly sensitive to the visual shapes of things, an artist makes a pleasant habit of observing such shapes in the course of his day, and retaining their forms in memory. The artist may see a spot of lichen on a tree, or a pattern in a piece of driftwood, or in a grained door, but may be totally unconscious of these observations. Not verbalised, they sink into the artist’s mind until needed. This activity, of reading into a form on a canvas an image corresponding to one already in the subconscious, was also described in an article on “Dada”, discussing the pictorial collaborations of Max Ernst and Baargeld:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, central panel), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, right panel: Hell), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, right panel: Hell), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (pp. 98-99) They begin to discover in a drawing another drawing the contours of which appear slowly out of the tangled lines – like an apparition, like a prophecy, like the messages in table tapping. We are confronted here with a process not quite comparable to that of perceiving an image in a spot on the wall as Leonardo da Vinci did; nor yet does it consist of lifting an object out of its natural environment. Other forces are at work: accident and surprise at their most inscrutable and intense level, the discovery of second sight in the spirit itself. (Fantastic, 26-27)

As a matter of fact, the process of thought involved is familiar to anyone who has ever observed figures or objects in cloud formations, or in the discolorations of wallpaper. In A Way to Stimulate and Arouse the Mind to Various Inventions, Leonardo himself wrote a description of this phenomenon – thus attesting to the fact that the process has been used by artists in earlier times:

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see diverse combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.

Although he was not referring to the production of irrational results, the method that Leonardo describes is similar to that used by some of the artists who do deal in the irrational. It would be presumptuous to claim to understand the mind of Hieronymus Bosch, and therefore, the exact nature of his “mode of visual thought”. Since his results are similar in principle to the examples of the irrational that have been cited, it can be assumed that his manner of working was similar to some of the processes described. It would be impossible to tell whether he worked according to rational or irrational directives. His imagery is so involved that he may have brought many processes to bear in its formation. In part, Bosch was undoubtedly illustrating in a rational manner ideas received from theology and folklore. His hybridisation was a flamboyant elaboration of the same device used so often by medieval artists. The strange effects he achieved can be partially explained by his reasonable desire to present the obverse satanic world, by “queering” the normal one. He would make his creatures, their activities, and their environments as weird and unworldly as possible, yet make them believable by rendering them with all of the technical mastery he would ordinarily use to produce the illusion of the natural world.

That Bosch was also acting according to subconscious directives within the framework of his rational intentions cannot be doubted. His paintings are compelling in their power on the viewer. Of course, it may be, as suggested in the discussion of

Goya, that this fascination on the viewer’s part is the result of the stimulation of his or her subconscious mind by Bosch’s imagery. The explanations that the viewer attempts to read into the imagery may not have existed in Bosch’s mind at all. But psychologists believe that the subconscious mind is much alike in every person; so, what Bosch produced by allowing his subconscious mind its play, might evoke a deep response by recognition of something with which the viewer also held subconscious familiarity. The fact of the subconscious, insisted upon by modern psychologists and exploited by modern Surrealists, has been given more and more recognition in modern times. That human behaviour is not accidental, that all humans act according to deep-seated and early-formed directives within the psyche; that the attempt to ignore and repress the instincts is made at the individual’s peril – all these things are ideas that have grown for a century or more in prominence. We have learned that reason is only a part of the full human potential – perhaps only a small part, at that. Carl Jung made profound observations upon the mind’s darker, deeper portions. According to his belief, the mind not only possesses levels lying below consciousness, but above and surrounding it as well. He claimed that the unconscious is not just an “inessential and unreal appendage” to the conscious, but that it is a world with activities, reasons, and laws of its own. We may believe that the artists discussed in this chapter, most particularly Hieronymus Bosch, were those who “let the unconscious go its own way and [experienced] it as reality”. They are, as a consequence, universally misunderstood. Because most artistic creations have meaning in all of their parts, it is expected that the works of these persons should as well. There is no way, however, to make the connections between each part in their works logically consistent in meaning. The only things that can be rationally understood are the total idea and the sources for individual parts. What has been made of these sources, however, is not a new logic. It is an artistic creation.

In order to clarify these concepts in tangible terms, an example from Bosch’s works, the Lisbon Temptation of Saint Anthony (pp. 152-153), will be discussed in the next two chapters. Certain ideas will be presented as possible source material for the painting’s imagery. This will be done, not because the painting is necessarily dependent upon the ideas, or the images subordinate to the ideas – but because the license that Bosch assumed with these ideas and the lengths to which he departed from them are more vividly apparent if they are known.

The painting itself will be examined in the final chapter. Its imagery will be referred to the source ideas only to show what Bosch made of them. No attempt will be made to explain images according to any deep rational meaning hidden in each one of them. In other works it may not be necessary to find a key as Fränger did, with which to unlock meaning. These paintings can be observed from the point of view of pure imaginative projections around a pivotal idea such as hell or a saint’s visions. They are disturbing, yes, but so are the concepts on which the painter elaborated. They are rich fields for the stimulating of associative ideas in the viewer’s mind, but it is enough to consider this marvellous imagery as “imaginative creation in its own right”.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, right panel: Hell), c. 1500-1505. Oil on panel, 220 x 389 cm (triptych). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.