Heidenreich 1970
“Hieronymus Bosch in Some Literary Contexts” (Helmut Heidenreich) 1970
[in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), pp. 171-199]
[Also mentioned in Gibson 1983: 34 (C20)]
Heidenreich discusses a number of references to Bosch in seventeenth-century Spanish texts. Because of the numerous allusions to Bosch in the work of Quevedo he thinks that this author secretly admired Bosch. Other Spanish authors consider the painter an atheist (Juan Pérez de Montalbàn), a creator of luxurious paintings (Butrón, Pacheco) or simply of weird dream-scenes (Carducho, the popular literary genres, the Spanish-Portuguese Manuel de Melo).
According to Heindenreich the thesis that in seventeenth-century Spain Bosch was considered a heretic cannot be proven by the documents he studied. What they do signal is that in literary texts and reviews the name of Bosch was associated with a certain (bizarre, grotesque, fanciful) genre that was mostly valued in a negative way.
The general impression that is left by Heidenreich’s article is that the seventeenth-century Spanish authors understood very little about the painter from Brabant.
[explicit]
