De “Geheimtaal” van Jheronimus Bosch: Een Interpretatie van zijn Werk (review)

Hieronymus Bosch has become synonymous in art historical scholarship with far-reaching exegetical analyses and equally far-fetched conclusions about his personality and artistic intentions. Jeanne Van Waadenoijen’s new offering to the field of Bosch scholarship attempts to demythologize the artist and his oeuvre for a nonspecialist reader. The author’s intention is to return to a no-nonsense approach to analyzing and interpreting Bosch’s work within the context of late-medieval Christianity. Thus, in a pithy introduction, Van Waadenoijen examines the few existing primary sources documenting the life and career of Bosch, thereby demonstrating how little is actually known about the artist’s life that can be substantiated by archival evidence. In part 1, “Leven en werk: feiten en achter-gronden,” the author gives an overview of the social context of Bosch’s oeuvre in terms of topics such as contemporary religious practice (“Zorg voor het zieleheil”), artists’ roles in the choice of subject matter, the relations between artists and patrons, the training of artists and their levels of literacy and formal education, and a short survey of important literary works of contemporary popular culture. Van Waadenoijen’s tidy glosses of the religious and literary “bestsellers” of the late fifteenth-century urban citizen (e.g., Horologium Sapientiae, Roman de la Rose, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine) offer insight into the worldview of Bosch’s late medieval public. A general reader will also appreciate the succinct explanations of techniques such as dendrochronology used by art historians to date works attributed to Bosch. The greatest amount of attention is given to the description and interpretation of Bosch’s oeuvre (part 2). This section is composed of formal analyses of Van Waadenoijen’s corpus: the twenty-nine color plates and details of the altarpieces generally accepted by scholars as autograph or close copies of Bosch originals that illustrate the text. Van Waadenoijen offers information about the provenance of each of the discussed works and then proceeds to locate their subject matter and iconography within the pictorial conventions and habits of mind of Bosch’s time. Finally, in a short conclusion, Van Waadenoijen returns to her central project: debunking implausible interpretations of Bosch’s work. Her research insists that because Bosch’s most securely attributed surviving oeuvre consists of altarpieces and religious subjects, interpretations of the artist’s fascinating and puzzling pictorial “language” must be derived from tropological analysis of the Bible and other religious texts.

Art historians, and Bosch specialists in particular, will find reason to raise their eyebrows at the manner in which entire strands of Bosch scholarship with which Van Waadenoijen strongly takes issue — for example, the argument that Bosch’s oeuvre signals changes in the burghermoraal of the increasingly urban population of the Low Countries, as in the research of Paul Vandenbroeck and Herman Pleij — are relegated to laconic footnotes. In contrast, several paragraphs in the conclusion are devoted to straw-horse targets, such as Wilhelm Fraenger’s 1947 proposition that the Garden of Earthly Delights was produced for a sect of Adamites or freethinkers who supposedly favored nudism. This has the effect of perhaps inadvertently implying that such interpretations are the continued historiographical norm for Bosch scholarship despite the publication of several studies in recent decades that suggest otherwise. Van Waadenoijen argues that the surest way to understand works of art intended for use in personal devotion or public liturgy is to interpret them within the contemporary “Christian religion and Christian ethics” that “governed social life” (251). Unfortunately, one of the byproducts of writing for a generalist reader is the author’s tendency to smooth over complications about how “the Christian faith” would be experienced by the socially, culturally, and economically diverse individuals who consumed Bosch’s paintings, and those produced by the Bosch family workshop and the artist’s epigones. Van Waadenoijen gives the impression that she understands the Catholic Church...