Baert 2019
DE UIL IN DE GROT
Gesprekken met beelden, kunstenaars en schrijvers
(Barbara Baert) 2019
[Pelckmans Pro, Kalmthout, 2019, 255 pages]
For this book, Barbara Baert (art historian of the Catholic University Louvain, KU Leuven) invited a number of academics, artists, and art lovers to discuss a work of art of their own choice. Each time, she goes into a dialogue with her guest authors and guides ‘their intuitions to the broader background of the pictorial analysis’. One of these guest authors is the Flemish television and radio presenter Thomas Vanderveken (born 1981). His choice was Jheronimus Bosch’s Garden of Delights triptych, and his personal insights concerning this painting can be read on the pages 164-169.
Vanderveken complains that museum visitors usually take so little time to go deeper into a painting, says that the Garden of Delights tells him what it means to be a human, and wonders whether the triptych is either a warning of or a tribute to the carnal lusts. Under the title De uil in de grot (The owl in the cave, pp. 170-175), Baert reacts to this. First, she elaborately refers to Paul Vandenbroeck’s thesis that the central panel of the Garden represents a ‘grail’ (graal, false love paradise). Concerning the owl in the opening of the Fountain of Paradise (left interior panel), she then points out that in Christianity the owl can refer to Good as well as to Evil and writes some incoherent things about the ‘cave’ theme.
Both Vanderveken’s and Baert’s texts largely boil down to ‘purple prose’ hardly telling anything which is essential. Furthermore, the owl in the left interior panel of the Garden is not sitting inside a cave but in the opening of a fountain. That Vanderveken refers to the Garden using the word ‘canvas’ instead of ‘panel’ can of course be forgiven. That art historian Baert refers to the same painting using the words ‘canvas’ and ‘altarpiece’ (retabel) is less understandable.
[explicit December 28, 2024 – Eric De Bruyn]
