Guillaud / Guillaud 1988
JÉRÔME BOSCH – LE JARDIN DES DÉLICES
(Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud
with the cooperation of Isabel Mateo Gomez) 1988
[Guillaud Editions, Paris-New York, 1988, 294 pages]
The most striking part of this Garden of Delights monograph is the special layout of the department with detail pictures: on India paper, often against a brightly-coloured background, and sometimes accompanied by Maurice Guillaud’s comment lines, apparently with poetical intentions but alas of little interest. Maurice Guillaud also delivered a short, likewise poetical introduction. The two contributions of the Spanish art historian Isabel Mateo Gomez have a more down-to-earth character. Her first contribution (Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices, pp. 11-39) focuses on Bosch’s potential sources, on the interpretations of the Garden, on art and culture around 1500, on Bosch’s influence and reception, and finally also on the conservational status and technique of the triptych. Her second contribution (Analyse du triptyque, pp. 255-289) offers a concise analysis of the Garden. Mateo Gomez considers the Garden of Delights a didactical and moralizing work of art, showing influences of alchemical symbolism, which does not imply that Bosch was an alchemist (see page 27).
Mateo Gomez’ approach is very synoptical and inconveniently arranged and as a result also rather superficial and vague. An illustrative example of this can be found on page 37, where she discusses the Garden’s influence on i.a. modern movies: Au cinéma, Buñuel, Pasolini et Bergman, s’en souviennent aussi (in the cinema, Buñuel, Pasolini, and Bergman also remember it). This one sentence without further comment is all the reader gets. Furthermore, Mateo Gomez’ texts sometimes offer information that has meanwhile become superseded or is even incorrect.
[explicit February 18, 2025 – Eric De Bruyn]
