Religion: Bosch & the Flesh

One of the great painters of all time was a somber-minded Fleming named Hieronymus Bosch, who lived in 15th century Burgundy. Like other medieval artists, he took most of his themes from religion, executed them for wealthy clerical or lay patrons. No religious artist before or since, however, has seen fit to people his canvases with such a mocking and horrifying mixture of vegetable, animal and mineral monstrosities.

Painter Bosch’s versions of Hell are waist-deep in griffins, scarabs, metallic demons with forked tails, sinners whose truncated bodies are pierced by huge swords or impaled on giant musical instruments. Although he had his gentler moments on canvas, his earthly scenes abound in abandoned lovers, tortured sick men and money-loving monks, with a watching demon or two always close at hand. Through them runs a train of almost surrealistic symbolism, a cross patch of a witches’ Sabbath and a psychoanalyst’s nightmare, that has fascinated and baffled five centuries of art critics.

Perfect Love? A German art historian named Wilhelm Fränger is the latest to have a try at unraveling the tangle of Bosch’s imagery. In a book recently published, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (University of Chicago Press; $10), he sets forth an original conclusion: Bosch was not an orthodox Christian with a morbid interest in sins of the flesh, but a heretic, whose odd images are “cryptograms” and “hieroglyphs” understandable only to other initiates of his cult.

Almost nothing is known of Bosch’s life except that he was a member of a semi-monastic lay community. Critic Fränger, basing his judgment on clues found in the paintings, thinks Bosch was also secretly an Adamite, a member of a sect called “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which found many underground recruits in the late Middle Ages. The Adamites reacted strongly against the church view on unbounded fleshly pleasures. They believed that perfection could be achieved not by ascetic prayer, but by a return to the perfect love of natural man, as typified by Adam and Eve. Sex, in their view, was essentially beautiful, never embarrassing. To emphasize this, they often took off their clothes during their secret rituals.

An Adamite Family. Fränger has devoted his book, the first volume of a series, to an explanation of the famous triptych which Bosch called The Millennium, more often known as The Garden of Early Delights. Its three panels represent, respectively, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a panorama of naked and untrammeled figures disporting themselves in the world outside, and a scene of dark punishment in Hell. Most critics hold this to be a logical sequence of Creation, worldly pleasure and eternal punishment. Fränger disagrees. He believes that Bosch’s naked figures represent not lust but “primal innocence.” In his view, the artist was portraying an “Adamite family … in which unbounded sensual delight and serene chastity hold equal sway.”

In the painting, writes Fränger, “Bosch . . . depicted the path of salvation to be found in a religious art of loving . . . and so set up a table of values expressing the idea that Christian faith and a life completely in harmony with Nature could be reconciled with each other.” Among his proofs he cites the accompanying scene of Hell, which contains “musicians, gamblers, desecrators of churches, covetous nuns, dissolute priests and murderous knights . . . but not a single adept of carnal love.”

Other critics would dispute Fränger’s evidence. In the last analysis, whether Bosch was an enthusiastic nature-worshiper or a dour pillar of orthodoxy is a mystery as difficult to interpret as the cracked sphere, the bloated birds or the strange, naked horsemen in his enigmatic paintings.