Blood & Roses

What is the meaning of your frightened

face, of your pale features? It looks as if you imagined all the spirits from Hell were flying round your ears.

I could think you had listened to the roaring depths of Pluto's domain;

I could imagine all the gates of Hell had been opened to you. . . .

Lampsonius, a Flemish poet, was writing about a self-portrait by history's first surrealist painter, Hieronymus Bosch. This week the first book in English on the hobgoblined 15th Century master attempted a 20th Century character-reading of Bosch's frightened face and his frightening paintings.

Howard Daniel's Hieronymus Bosch (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $6) is handicapped by dull, fuzzy reproductions, and also by the fact that almost nothing is known of the painter's life. But Critic Daniel does manage to place Bosch, and surrealism too, in historical perspective. Bosch's visions of Hell reflected the crackup of feudalism, Daniel believes--as (he implies) Salvador Dali's limp watches indicate weakness in our own civilization.

Hell at Lunch. Born about 1450, Bosch spent most of his life in the city of s-Hertogenbosch, in a house overlooking the market place. At one time he sketched some designs for stained glass windows in the town's great Cathedral of St. John (which had been damaged by fire and was rebuilt in Bosch's youth). He was married, and a member of the austerely devout lay Brotherhood of Our Lady. Almost the only other biographical fact on record is that he died in 1516.

It is known that Bosch's Brotherhood held daily lunchtime readings of Denis the Carthusian's tabulation of Hell's horrors, and Bosch must also have read the Vision of Tondale, an Irish precursor of Dante's Inferno which was on every 15th Century bookshelf. But Bosch's swarming illustrations of earthly pleasures and sulphurous punishments are more vivid than what he read, and full of surprises. Says Daniel: Bosch was a realist as well as a surrealist--sharp-eyed, and haunted by disgust for the hell-on-earth around him.

Hell Among the Animals. Bosch's technique was much more assured, though less meticulous, than Dali's. He worked fast, crowding his hundreds of naked couples into vast, thinly painted caverns of torture and lust. Riding on mice, swallowed by fishes, imprisoned in bubbles, embracing pigs, bound, speared and tickled by an infinite variety of goblins, Bosch's nightmare victims were perhaps undergoing daytime evils in disguise: plague, typhus, war, leprosy, and the Inquisition. His paintings, like the times, were fitfully illuminated by religion; the suffering Christ and adoring Saints rode free above the horrid carnival.

Modern surrealists paint nightmares which are more hopeless, because religion never illumines them: for most moderns, Hell is an atomic, not a supernatural, threat. But their art has much in common with their founder's, because their eras were alike too. Dutch Historian Huizinga was summarizing Bosch's 15th Century, not the 20th, when he wrote: "So violent and ugly was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses. The men of that time always oscillated between the fear of Hell and the most naive joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachments to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness, always running to extremes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.