Hammacher 1936
JEROEN BOSCH
(A.M. Hammacher) 1936
[De Vrije Bladen – Onafhankelijk Maandschrift voor Kunst en Letteren, Schrift 9, vol. 13 (1936), 31 pages]
[Also mentioned in Gibson 1983: 43 (D11)]
A short, rather superficial text, in no way ground-breaking. ‘He [Bosch] did not act compulsively, as is sometimes asserted by the surrealists and psycho-analysts of today, he did not unconsciously surrender to the imagination of evil and sin. He was not an artistic sleepwalker, no somnambulist ecstacy guided him. He was familiar with calculation and consideration’ [pp. 10-11, my translation]. Bosch’s spiritual ancestors are the Roman sculptors of the 12th century and also the miniaturists [p. 13]. ‘For he can hardly be called a moralist, unless certain meticulous describers of depravity can be called true moralists. Hieronymus Bosch is the type of the critical pleasure-seeker who has not enough eyes to catch sin all around him, but his passionate attention is joined to a sharp intellect, which prevents him from playing the hypocrite, the fake preacher of penitence’ [p. 14, my translation].
Most probably, Bosch read Tondalus’ Visoen [The Vision of Tonal], a book that was published in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1484 [p. 14, note 1]. ‘His moral judgment is not really a moral disapproval. He shows too much hidden lust and too much marginal disappointment. (…) But he dances upon the shards and recalls Christ’s teachings only in the background, far away, or hidden in a small corner. He does not recognize the enemies of faith with a warm heart. He jeers, mocks, and has fun, and is inclined to reserve only little space for the soft forces’ [p. 15, my translation]. ‘Those who are familiar with the marginal swarmings of manuscripts can interpret Bosch’s art as the transition of the coloured drawings of the illuminators into the art of painting’ [pp. 19-20, my translation].
In 1493/94, Bosch designed windows for the chapel of the Brotherhood of Our Lady in the St John’s. ‘If Bosch was a stained-glass artist, it is possible that a preference for vertical compositions and a certain ease to place figures inside a circle can be explained by his practice as a stained-glass artist’ [p. 21, my translation]. ‘Probably, only modern psycho-analysis can technically disentangle in some way this symbolic confusion, this meeting of traditional and personal symbolism of the subconscious. But this meeting of two kinds of symbolic data inevitably gives Bosch an ambiguous character’ [p. 29, my translation]. Hammacher briefly discusses some works of Bosch, but remarkably enough the Garden of Delights triptych is never mentioned.
[explicit March 24, 2000 – Eric De Bruyn]
