The "Triptych of the Insults" attributed to El Bosco. A technical study

Ineba 2003

“The Triptych of the Insults attributed to El Bosco. A technical study” (Pilar Ineba) 2003

[in: Hélène Verougstraete and Roger van Schoute (eds.), Le dessin sous-jacent et la technologie dans la peinture. Colloque XIV, 13-15 septembre 2001, Bruges-Rotterdam. Jérôme Bosch et son entourage et autres études. Uitgeverij Peeters, Louvain-Paris-Dudley (Ma.), 2003, pp. 58-63]

Pilar Ineba (a Spanish art historian specialized in conservation and restoration) focuses on some technical aspects of the Crowning with Thorns triptych (which she calls Triptych of the Insults), conserved in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia San Pio V. This triptych was brought to Valencia by Mencia de Mendoza (the third wife of Henry III of Nassau) in the sixteenth century. In 1554 Mencia was buried in the Monastery of Santo Domingo in Valencia and the triptych was moved to one of the chapels of this monastery. In the nineteenth century the triptych was transferred to what is now the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia. In Spain there are two other paintings with the same composition as can be seen in the central panel (El Escorial / Museo Làzaro Galdiano, Madrid). Technical research (XR and IRR) revealed the following differences between the central panel and the wings…

• The grain of the wood (oak) runs horizontally in the central panel, vertically in the wings.
• For the underdrawing a brush has been used in the wings and a harder material, such as charcoal, in the central panel.
• In the central panel the underdrawing has been executed in a finer and more detailed way.
• In the central panel the lines of the sketches have often been redone (one line on top of the other), in the wings the drawing is more direct and simpler.

This proves that more attention has been paid to the central panel than to the wings and that the artistic quality of the central panel is higher than that of the wings. Ineba seems to suggest that the triptych was executed by the Bosch pupil who is mentioned by Felipe de Guevara.

It should be noticed that the quality of the English in this contribution is not always good (due to a mediocre translation) and that the abstract does not always agree with the content of the actual text. The Valencia triptych is probably the work of a Bosch imitator (see Klein’s dendrochronological findings in Klein 2003: 5/6 (fig. 2).

[explicit]