The inventor leaves behind a mesmerizing collection of masterpieces. Yet little is known of him. The most inscrutable painter of the 15th century, his bizarre, disquieting renditions elicit volumes of psycho-babble. His legendary creations fascinate, startle, shock and often horrify. Art historians admit they know close to nothing about the man himself. Only dogged efforts to solve the mystery that surrounds him and gritty detective work allow, with wide gaps and missing links along the way, to reconstitute a few key dates and salient details, all of which must be read and plumbed against the religious, social, political and philosophical backdrop that was the artist’s world.
Born with another surname than that by which he is more widely known, he comes into the world in October 1453. He changes his name, adopting the last syllable of his hometown, ‘s-Hertogenbosch. His death in 1516 is recorded in the register of the Brotherhood of Notre Dame, in which he is inducted in 1486. A funeral mass in his memory is held in the famed St. John Cathedral where a menagerie of grotesque ornaments adorns the exterior façade and the choir.
In 1488, also according to the archives of the Brotherhood, he presides over the “Swan’s Banquet,” a ritual said to have inspired his baffling painting, Marriage at Cana, source of much debate about his Masonic identity. That same year he is raised a Master. Scant other facts survive. He marries a “woman of landed gentry,” completes a matrix for stained glass windows in the Brotherhood’s lodge at St. John Cathedral, and dies. His funeral is recorded with laconic detachment. He leaves behind no letters or diaries. Nothing is known about his personality, his thoughts on the meaning of life, his raison d’être as an artist and social satirist. Whatever might have existed is presumed lost or, more characteristically, deliberately destroyed by the artist to ensure privacy or deter the uninitiated from decoding the mysterious clues his life and work could have left behind. Another theory explored by Montvert in a monograph published in the Annals of the Museo del Prado in Madrid suggests that the painter’s most disturbing works were purchased en masse after his death, less out of reverence for his genius than out of fear that they present graphic and damaging allusions about a bloated aristocracy and a corrupt clergy, two self-anointed elites who have made it a career of oppressing and exploiting the masses.
Montvert’s assumptions are greeted with cautious interest by the Spanish art world. Miffed, the Archdiocese of Madrid issues a frosty statement accusing Montvert of engaging in wild conjectures that are unsupported by history.
“Whose ‘history’,” Montvert asks. His question is ignored.
Around 1475, at a time when the artist’s career begins to blossom, painters of the day conform to immutable principles laid out long before them. Their pictures are infused with the solemnity and stiffness of divine service. They retrace Biblical events and are contrived to invite the faithful to humble devotion and mystic exaltation of the soul. The flock is beckoned to higher spirituality but the language, which the flock must grasp without ambiguity, is banal, prosaic. It commands blind obedience to God; it discourages self-scrutiny and condemns profane knowledge. Submit. Kneel. Bow your head. Pray. Believe. Believe or else.
The painter Montvert and Albeniz suspect van den Haag is referring to in his letter is the first to break away from this tradition. With him, art begins to shake off the rigid tutelage of the Church. Outwardly pious, his paintings also point fingers at the clergy’s debauchery and inventive cruelty. Man is no longer God’s finest enterprise but a weak, flawed creature given to extremes of naïveté and ferocity, charity and malice, creativity and nihilism.
Revered or reviled, the “inventor’s” paintings are hard to describe, except for the obvious which, more often than not, conveys obscure or allegorical concepts. Underplayed but ubiquitous, alchemy, magic, the Kabbalah, Scripture, augury and folk humor unite to create strange, sometimes frightening, always other-worldly scenes of trancelike boredom or hysteria. Set against deceptively tranquil backdrops, his triptychs and wood panels erupt in paroxysms of perversion and lunacy. Miscegenated creatures excrete gold, fly in satanic formations to monstrous Sabbaths where they devour unspeakable fare. They retch, pray with trancelike fervor, lust after sexless hybrids, assault and kill and in turn die a thousands deaths skewered by the very wind instruments on which they play their lugubrious tunes. Everywhere, someone inflicts or surrenders to untold abominations with a detachment akin to apathy while fantastic beings, part-animal, part-ghoul, tear at their flesh or render them mad. Somewhere, lost or bewildered, they reach out, clutching at something, sometimes at themselves, as if to shake off some invisible yet intolerable yoke. And they never let go.
The Master’s brush conveys stupefaction, bestiality, innocence and crushing ennui. Through his tormented gaze are reflected all the expressions that betray the madcap ambivalence of the human spirit. Sensuality and eroticism, sometimes veiled, often explicit, saturate his images but there is no passion in the coveting, no humanity in the piety, no fervor in the carnality. Depraved as they seem, his characters inspire pity, not horror. Pervasive, often gratuitous, scenes of widespread violence are offset by the lifeless gaze of both tormentor, who shows no fury and victim, who appears to feel no pain. Their ordeal, gruesome as it is, never seems to convey an explicit level of intolerability. All are dazed, stunned. When one suffers, the great painter tells us as we gape at the numb or snarling expressions of his subjects, it’s just a question of degree. Pain travels but it never goes away.
A late October downpour drenches Paris. The rain turns to swirling tendrils of vapor that rise skyward as soon it reaches the ground. The City of Light, resplendent under azure skies, acquires the kind of glossy murkiness that gives films noir their tantalizing and ill-omened ambiance. The weather lends an eerie backdrop to the movie Montvert is watching on TV, the dark, caustic Le Silence de la Mer. Based on an anti-German novel secretly published in occupied France, the brooding, sparsely dialogued psychodrama evokes long forgotten childhood memories. He had seen it once before, when he was ten or so, with his parents in a theater in Marseille. And, some of the scenes, he remembers, had stirred recollections of yet earlier events that had marked him forever.
Strewn on the settee is an assortment of letters and packages received in the morning mail. Montvert absent-mindedly sifts through his correspondence. He recognizes a distinctive handwriting and unseals an envelope.
Dear Brother Montvert,
I received your kind letter this morning. Heartened by your encouraging tenor and the interest you share with Dr. Albeniz in this matter, I hasten to reply.
First, to allay some of your misgivings, let me reassure you that my ancestor’s posthumous commentaries are models of clarity. He doesn’t mince words. His feelings and convictions are bluntly articulated. From them can be distilled the crucial premises upon which his works are based: Sin and folly are the universal legacy of mankind; hell-fire through intolerance, greed and war its common destiny. This deeply gloomy perspective, however emblematically conveyed, must not be confused with mysticism, which he rejected, or fire-and-brimstone religiosity, which he abhorred. Contrary to the grandiloquent assertions of scholars who, for lack of evidence or imagination, see him as a docile agent of Christian doctrine, nothing in this astonishingly candid tract (or in his paintings, for that matter) betrays even a shred of personal spiritual conviction. His insights into the human soul are hard-nosed and grounded in experience and observation. As you will note when you peruse the document, his language -- like much of his art -- is laced with irony, anticlerical verve, and spiked with acerbic satire against the Church. He denounces the corruption and hypocrisy of the clergy, the repressive power of the papacy. Craving for truth, longing to expose it, he joins his contemporaries in protest against the abuses, against simony, against bribery, against the commerce of indulgences, against the scorching venality of God’s emissaries.
The most provocative aspect of my forebear’s work, once initial consternation or shock subsides, lay in the symbolism, at times subdued, often manifest, that suggests he was a member of a sect of free-thinkers, most probably -- as you put forward in your essay published in the Travaux du Grand Orient of France -- a precursor of our Fraternal Order. His elegantly penned testament puts an end to the speculation. He confirms his association with organizations that, while only vaguely reminiscent in structure and scope of modern Freemasonry, led a double life and whose covert objective was to challenge the repressive influence of religion on scholarship and personal freedoms.
Last, yes, I am the final descendant of Jeroen Van Aken, better known as Hieronymus Bosch.
Copies of his manuscript are being sent to you and Dr. Albeniz by air courier. Please let me hear from you after you’ve had a chance to peruse and digest this astonishing opus. I thank you in advance for consenting to help shed Further Light on the man and his edifying pronouncements.
Looking forward to laboring with you and Brother Albeniz in the very near future, I remain, for Reason,
Fraternally yours,
Jan H. van den Haag, 32o.