All language subtitles for Great Art Series 2 3of5 Hieronymous Bosch 1080p ITV

Welcome to Great Art. For the past
few years,

we've been filming the biggest
exhibitions in the world,

about some of the greatest artists
and art in history.

Not only do we record
these landmark shows,

but we also secure privileged access
behind the scenes

of the galleries
and museums concerned.

We then use the exhibition
as a springboard

to take a broader look
at these artists.

This week, we bring you an exhibition

that is genuinely a
once-in-a-lifetime experience.

To celebrate the 500th anniversary

of the death of the great
Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch,

his home town of Den Bosch assembled

the largest exhibition of his
paintings and drawings ever staged.

It was unprecedented,
and so popular

that the gallery had to
remain open until 1am every night.

Hieronymus Bosch
was a remarkable artist.

A singular talent who continues
to inspire artists today.

He was painting at the same time
as Leonardo and Michelangelo,

but in the Italian-dominated world
of Western art history,

he's never quite had their status.

However, his technical gifts
are self-evidently remarkable

and his imaginative powers
seemed unrestrained,

creating visions in oil paint
that are overwhelmingly powerful,

sometimes bizarre, frightening,
and beautiful,

and always deserving
of a closer look.

This exhibition was...

I have to say,
I think one of the best exhibitions

I've seen in my entire life.

One, because it got so many
of the paintings together.

Never done before.
Two, it was a pioneering show.

They had nothing to swap
except their expertise,

so what they did is they persuaded

the greatest museums
to lend their great pieces

on the proviso that they would do
some analysis of them.

There are no paintings or drawings

of Jheronimus Bosch in his native
town,

so we had to find a way to get
the other museums prepared

to loan us their works.

And we thought, "What would
be of interest for those museums?"

And we said, "Knowledge."

Knowledge is a thing that all the
other museums are interested in.

We could do research on all the
works of Jheronimus Bosch.

From 2008, I visited all the museums

in the United States and in Europe

with works of Bosch
in their collection,

and I asked the directors
of the museums and the curators, uh,

whether they would co-operate
for such a research project.

And I mentioned the possibility
of the conservation,

and that we would be very glad
to have an exhibition

at the end of that research project
in 2016

when it would be the year of the
fifth centennial of Bosch's death.

So, in the end, we have,

from the 24 paintings
that are attributed to Bosch,

we have 17 paintings here.

And from the 20 drawings
attributed to him,

we have 19 here in our exhibition,

so that's a tremendous success.

I think in asking for the loans,
the museum were very clever

in that they made it clear
that they wanted to bring

so many works back into the context
in which they were created,

which always brings new insights
into a work -

just seeing them also
amassed together.

As one critic actually said,
he's like,

"Bosch probably never saw so many
artworks of his own all together."

And that really enables an art
historian to do the sorts of things

normally we can only do with JPEGs
or with catalogues.

This is the only moment where we
have, let's say, two dozen works
in one room.

We can make those sorts
of comparisons

and get a better sense
of his chronology as well.

What is he looking at
at different moments of his life?

What has he learned? And where does
he go from that moment onwards?

(GREGORIAN CHANT)

NARRATOR: A lone traveller plods his
way through life.

The road ahead is closed by a gate.

An aggressive dog growls
at his heels.

The traveller is just passing
a house of ill repute,

and the landscape in the distance
looks barren and desolate.

With what few possessions he has,
he trudges cautiously,

looking back over his shoulder
and moving ever forwards.

He is 'Everyman.'

Will the traveller open the gate
and continue on his way,

despite the ox who blocks his path?

Or will he wander off
into sin and vice?

And what do we see?

A pig's trotter as an amulet.

A catskin hanging just below the
spoon on the outside of his pack.

The signs are ominous.

An inverted jug sticks up
from the apex of the gable.

Underwear hangs from the window.

A man urinating in the corner,

and a couple canoodling
in the doorway.

We are watching...and being watched.

(GREGORIAN CHANT CONTINUES)

An owl, high up in the tree,
has its eye

on a small bird perched
a few branches lower.

The viewer sees a pilgrim on his
road and, like him,

must choose which course to take

without deviating from
the true path.

He will ultimately be held to
account for the choices he has made.

And for how he has led his life.

Who was Bosch?
That is the great question.

Nobody really knows.

What we do know is that he wasn't
the mad tortured genius

running amok that we sometimes like
to think of him as.

He was actually a rather
respectable townsman.

He was born in Den Bosch.
He married. Rather well, actually,

and lived in a very prosperous house
on the poshest side of the square.

His studio was on the other side.

He travelled very little,

and mainly lived his life happily
in Den Bosch,

working for commissioned pieces
and for a brotherhood.

's-Hertogenbosch at the time
of Hieronymus Bosch

wasn't a very big city.

It was a city mainly of tradesmen.

But, of course, here were also
all kinds of craftsmen working here,

weaving clothes, making shoes.

Building the houses, of course.

But there wasn't a court.
There wasn't a bishop.

There were quite a few monasteries,
chapels, churches.

I think city life and the world
around Bosch

was a source of inspiration
for his imagery.

And he looked at people
and he managed to reproduce them

very carefully and very precise
in his paintings.

He saw dogs. He saw horses
passing by.

At the same time, he had this great
fantasy, and he mixed it all
together.

And that's how he figured out
how to paint his hells

and all those aspects
in his paintings

that are the most fascinating
still today.

Bosch was a religious man.

He was a layperson.
He was married,

but as a sworn brother in the
Brotherhood of our Illustrious Lady,

he had committed himself to God
by shaving his head.

I think it's very popularly assumed
that Bosch was this freakish figure,

that he was a, sort of, subject
of psychotic visions.

He was very much taken up in the
'60s as someone who probably took
psychedelics or something.

In fact, he was really very much
a product of his late medieval era.

He draws upon the imagery
and the iconography

and the symbolism of that era
very profoundly.

But then does take it forward
into a modern age.

And I think that Bosch's really
important role in art history

is the way he links
the past and the present.

He's almost like a...
He is a link figure.

So, Bosch was taking this
very...fairy tale world,

as we see it, but factual world
as the medieval people saw it.

What he was saying was not something
extraordinary to medieval people.

This is what they believed. These
hellish visions are what they
thought about,

and what they had been taught
to believe by their church
and by their society.

NARRATOR: The Ecce Homo scene is
described in all four gospels -

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But it is John's version that Bosch
took as his source.

Ecce Homo is a traditional
religious theme,

painted as a memorial to its donors.

Bosch draws out meaning in the scene

by using a number
of unconventional details.

A bystander holds a burning torch
in broad daylight,

alluding to the haste with which
Christ has been tried and condemned,

and to the crowd's complicity.

The square is otherwise
ominously quiet and deserted,

in sharp contrast with the agitated
men who jostle in the foreground.

Pontius Pilate is showing Christ
to the Jewish people,

and Bosch has used Latin text
to emphasise the interaction

between those around
the tortured Christ.

Pilate points to Jesus with the words
'Ecce Homo' - 'Behold the man.'

The crowd of people looking up at him
call out, 'Crucifige Eum' -
'Crucify him.'

The monk, kneeling in front of his
brothers, and behind the male donor,

recites the prayer,
'Salva Nos Christe Redemptor' -

'Christ Redeemer. Save us.'

Christ is not positioned centrally.

Yet he is unmistakably the principal
figure of the overall composition.

Wearing the crown of thorns,
he has been flogged,

and his body is covered with wounds.

The agony of the scene is emphasised

by his bloody footprint
left on the ground.

In the early middle ages, the city
of 's-Hertogenbosch

was full of cloisters, erm...
clergymen.

And one out of three inhabitants

was one way or another
linked to the church.

We are here in the so-called

We are here in the so-called
Swan Brotherhood House,

which originally has been created
in 1318

by the Prince-Bishop of Liege

as a Marian-devotional fraternity -

the Illustrious Lady.

What we know about Hieronymus Bosch
as our brother

is that his father already was
a member of the Brotherhood.

It was a very respected
artist family in the city.

Bosch married a wealthy lady,

so, presumably, he was already in
the higher class of the local
society.

Bosch had an incredibly
rich imagination,

so whilst he was looking
at a variety of sources

and extracting pictorial imagery
from them -

for example,
prints or manuscript illuminations -

he was taking individual elements
from these sources

and putting them into colour
paintings in new ways, in new
settings.

At the same time he must have
been a great observer of nature.

He was looking at the world
around him,

studying human beings,
studying animals, studying nature,

and then transposing
that into two-dimensional painting,

which is an incredible thing,

to be able to condense
all of these different sources

into one single image.

And much of this observation
is evident in his drawings.

Sometimes you have single sheets

that have several figures that he
studies from different angles.

It's incredible. It's almost like an
inventory of that same figure

shown from different angles that he
can then go

and revert to and use in a larger
composition.

And so, his graphic oeuvre
is a good source

for us to see some of this great
imagination coming to life.

Bosch himself was in the first place
a Christian moralistic painter,

and he painted for, of course,

the audience of his own times,
for his contemporaries.

By painting it the way he did,
I think it gives...

and it still gives,
a universal meaning.

It's about good and evil.

It's how to behave, how to think
about life for yourself.

(GREGORIAN CHANT)

If Hieronymus Bosch walked into this
chapel on pretty much

any day of the week, he would have
heard a variety of music.

At this time, the human voice was
essential to devotional music.

Not to say that instruments
weren't involved.

There would have been
a beautiful organ,

and it's known there was
an organist in this building.

And we have lots of records of
instruments playing with the voices,

but the voice is, of course,
essential to a kind of music

which is expressing devotion to God,

especially through the texts of the
Bible and other religious texts.

So it's essential for the voice
to...

Again, it's the idea
of taking the word,

and when the word becomes important,
giving it an added dimension.

That's exactly what singing does to
a word as opposed to speaking it.

It gives it colour, and when you put
more voices together,

it makes it even more complex
and more ornate.

St Jerome must have had
a special significance

for his namesake Hieronymus Bosch.

The learned saint's
uncompromising moralism

and his personal religious commitment
makes him a worthy model.

Jerome stretches out on the ground
in an ominous landscape,

praying with utter devotion
to Christ.

He embraces a crucifix
with both arms,

his hands clasped together
and his eyes closed.

The rock, with which he has just
chastised himself, lies nearby.

Jerome meditates on the physical
torments suffered by Christ

while wrestling with his own
earthly desires.

A closed book lies between his
cassock and his cardinal's hat,

alluding to his scholarship
and the years he spent

working on a Latin translation
of the Bible.

On the left of the painting,
we see the lion

which was tamed when Jerome
extracted a thorn from his paw.

Following which, the beast became
his faithful companion.

The lion, cardinal's hat, book,
rock, and crucifix

are all standard attributes

in the depiction of St Jerome praying
in the wilderness.

Bosch was living in a time and in a
city where fear was everywhere.

There was, of course,
in that period,

the possibility of plagues
and fires.

Poor harvests.

The fact that 's-Hertogenbosch
was a fortified city

in the northern part of the Duchy
of Brabant and of Burgundy

explains why Philip 'the Fair' -
one of Bosch's commissioners -

and all those noblemen were here.

Because they started
their campaigns for war here.

And that explains
why the Count of Nassau

and all those other important
advisers from the Burgundian court

came to 's-Hertogenbosch

and had the opportunity
to visit Bosch in his studio.

This dramatic triptych has been in
Venice for over 350 years,

and represents the crucifixion
of a female saint, Wilgefortis.

The left wing shows St Anthony
in meditation

against the background
of a burning city.

While the right wing depicts a monk
leading a soldier

past a scene of violence
and destruction...

..including a sunken ship
and a beached whale.

The story of Wilgefortis is more
folktale than religious.

She is the daughter of a pagan king

who wants her to marry
another pagan king,

despite her vow of chastity
and devotion to Christ.

She prays for help
in resisting the marriage,

whereupon she miraculously
grows a beard,

and the match is withdrawn.

Her father is so furious,
he has her crucified.

The scene beyond the crucified martyr
shows a church in a landscape

that would have originally
run across both wings,

providing a background
for two male donors

thought to have commissioned
the painting.

These were overpainted centuries ago,

but can be made out clearly in X-ray
and infrared images of the painting.

This is the digitised image.

Originally, I think this image is
about 40 gigabytes or something.

So that was made available for us

by the computer engineer on our team

so that we can easily
access this painting

and actually see almost
into the cracks

and see what's going on there.

This type of magnification goes
further than a magnifying glass.

And it's almost
on a microscopic level

that you can now see the picture.

And what is the advantage

of this type of image
is that you can...

..zoom in very fast

and see how a specific area
of the painting is executed...

zoom out, and move
to a different part of the picture.

This type of imagery
is actually rather helpful

for conservators as well,
to do their job.

The original concept of this
triptych was abandoned,

and the wings were painted over.

And it was changed into...

a scene that is very much Bosch.

Especially the left wing,
where we see a city burning,

where we see various types
of demons and monsters.

And this is the type of imagery

that one would associate
with Bosch very much.

It strikes me that the double-sided
panels that Bosch paints

really reveal a great deal
about his knowledge

of the religious subjects
that he paints on one side.

For example, in his panel painting
of Christ carrying the cross,

on the opposite side,
on the outer wing,

he paints a grisaille of the young
Christ child,

who's holding a little toy,
like a little whirligig,

and is using a little walker...
and is making his first steps

as he's moving across the earth.

And there's something very striking
about those first delicate steps

of any child, but in this case,
the Christ child.

And his future as it's reflected on
the opposite side of the panel,

where he will be stumbling
under the weight of the cross

on which he will be crucified.

It's a very powerful understanding
of what that moment means.

Bosch absolutely knew
how to seize the imagination.

He knew that those fantastical
images were going to hold

a cold, hungry, bored peasant

kneeling on a cold stone church
for hours.

He knew how to hold
their imagination.

And it's that vividness, that
vitality, that fantastical
directness

which goes on through the ages -

that's why he seizes
our imaginations now.

The picture of Bosch that I have
in my mind is complicated.

In one way, he's a very serious man,

really thinking about what it is
to be human

and what it is to live in this world

and to connect to our creator
or his creator,

and the threats of devils and demons

and how to lead a just life,
and all things like that.

A very serious and philosophical
person in one way,

but in the other way, I tend to
think of him as a person

with a lot of humour, and he must
have enjoyed very much

painting all these hell scenes

and creating all these devilish
monsters and creatures.

The power in the paintings of Bosch
is, for me, the...directness.

There isn't a great distance
from the artist to the viewer,

and that's important
for his visual language.

He has this strategy
of keeping his audience

looking at his paintings,
thinking about the subject.

Bosch thought quite long about what
to represent, how to represent it,

and then he painted it very fast,
very direct.

The longer you look at the
paintings, the longer you are
thinking

about the subject of the painting,
and that's what Bosch wants.

Bosch offers us a powerful

and highly-innovative image
in The Haywain.

The Bible compares the transience of
human existence with that of grass...

..but there is no reference
of the haywain as a metaphor

in the traditional
literature of the time.

Bosch shows how, contrary
to God's commandment,

people give in to their greed.

Left unchecked,
human beings act like beasts,

and in doing so,
condemn themselves to hell.

The left wing shows
the Garden of Eden.

Bosch depicts the angels cast out
of heaven for disobeying God,

who now change into monstrous beings.

God creates the first human couple
who succumb to sin.

He reprimands them, and then the
archangel expels them from paradise.

We see very important people
of society.

We see the Emperor, we see the Pope,

we see kings, we see a lot
of nobility.

We see, in front of the haywain,
commoners who are fighting,

all trying to get a part
of that hay.

And at the bottom of the painting,
we see a fake dentist

who is pulling out teeth.

We see nuns, and we see
a very lazy monk who is drinking

and he looks towards the nuns

who are trying to get the hay,
and giving him a part of it.

Every person in society is trying
to get a part of that richness.

And there is a 15th century poem
that says that

the Lord gave us a lot of hay,
and it was meant to share.

But instead of it,
people are fighting for it.

Bosch was the first
and the only person in his time

who used this sort
of, uh, moralistic metaphors.

It's not the life of a saint.
It's not an example given by Christ.

Common people like us who
are depicted on this painting -

it's quite unusual to do such
a thing.

It wasn't meant for a church
or a chapel or a monastery.

It was meant for the house
of a nobleman or a rich citizen.

And you won't find it done
by other artists of his time.

Bosch was popular in Spain

from the beginning
of the 16th century,

and especially
in the time of Philip II.

A lot of paintings from Bosch
went to Spain...

and that gave them the impression

that it was a part of their culture.

And the fact that so many
works of Bosch

were assembled at the Spanish court

made him part of the cultural
heritage of Spain,

but he is still an artist
of the Low Countries.

The Garden of Earthly Delights
is an astounding painting.

It's a painting unlike any other.
It would have been closed.

The exterior of an altar generally
would have been painted in grisaille

in shades of black and white,
and shades of grey.

A globe in which
we see a desolate world.

A beautiful globe.
A transparent globe.

And the fact that he's
able to paint translucency

to such a high, convincing finish
is incredible,

so one sees his painterly skill
from the very beginning.

What is actually depicted
is the third day of creation,

and we see God the Father,
a tiny little God the Father,

in the upper left,
doing the creating,

but the creating is much grander,

and so, we're looking at the
macrocosm on the exterior

and we're seeing it
in black and white.

And then we open the shutters.

The owners of the triptych would
have been very proud of their
painting,

and had a special visitor coming,
they would have opened the triptych,

and behold, what one would have
seen, would have been this
incredible colour.

So, the contrast between
the very dark exterior

and the very colourful interior,

and the absence of what one was
expected to find in an altar piece,

which would have been saints.

One begins with the
left-hand side panel

and the representation of paradise.

One only sees a single scene,
in a way,

which is an unusual one -
the presentation of Eve to Adam.

God the Father, who we saw in the
exterior, was an elderly,
bearded God,

is here a much younger God,
very Christ-like.

Whilst you don't have the expulsion
of Adam and Eve

in the images themselves, you have
the implications of the fall of man.

You have all kinds
of ominous, sort of, animals,

three-headed animals. You've got
animals eating one another.

Ominous symbols in the nature
that surrounds Adam and Eve.

And in the very centre
of the composition,

you have this beautiful
fountain in pink.

In the interior of this opening
in the fountain is an owl.

And of course the owl
is an ominous symbol

and is telling us that something
is amiss in this paradise.

I find the central panel
particularly fascinating

because of the number of inversions
that one finds in the painting.

So, when one thinks of birds,
one expects to see them in the sky,

but in this case, um,
you have birds in water,

you have fish flying in the sky
or fish on land.

You have human beings
eating giant fruits,

so things have swollen
and become larger,

and human beings have shrunk
and become smaller.

The birds - Some of the birds
in the middle ground...

One of them has the most
beautiful blue feathers.

The very painterly way
in which he treats these birds

and the detail with which he -
The time he spends in painting them,

and the figures themselves,
the human beings that he paints
are much less highly finished,

much more quickly painted.

Again, it's an inversion in the
way in which he treats man
and animals.

You would think he would spend
more time painting the figures,

but in fact he seems to be spending
more time painting the animals.

Bosch is doing exactly,
in the painting,

what man would have been struggling
with, perhaps, in real life.

You know, struggling with
the temptations of the world,

and in a way, he's tempting us
with this painting.

In this case, he's dealing with one
single sin - the sin of lust.

The right-hand panel,
the very dark contrast,

which is the panel of hell -
the figures are basically punished

for everything that they've done
in the central panel.

So you have all kinds
of gory monsters...

Again, hybrid figures.
A very, very cacophonous scene.

There's a lot of musical instruments
that are being used for torture.

So that is something that's quite
important about Bosch as well.

Whilst his paintings
are very visual,

and, of course, The Garden of
Earthly Delights is a very
visual painting

and it entices you to look closely
and for a very prolonged period,

it's also very loud, in a way,
and it evokes a lot of sound.

We have a man that has
the head of a man,

but his torso is composed of a tree
trunk and he's got boats for shoes.

We have a very gory figure sitting
and defecating other figures.

Very inventive with the types
of monsters that he's imagining.

It would be unbelievable to have
a Garden of Earthly Delights

or a Haywain
in a church or a monastery.

But in the house or in the palace
of a nobleman,

that would be possible.

I think the securest way that
we regard Bosch is being very
contemporary.

You know, all art movements create
their own predecessors,

and the surrealists, of course,
were the first people

to imagine that Bosch was a
surrealist 400 years before its
time.

I think that's part of art
historical, you know, notions.

It's a sort of
backwards-forwards movement

that everybody in the art historical
world - the game is constantly being
played.

So, I think in the way it strikes us
as being modern.

Without fear. Fearless painting.

It's a David and Goliath situation.

Obviously with Bosch being David.

Like all the greatest artists,
his work transcends his time.

He is dealing with
something so primal,

so essential to our human natures,

that he's going to transcend
all periods

and he is always going
to remain curious.

What's fascinating to me, when I
think of Bosch, and when I talk to
other people

who have looked at Bosch paintings
but are not art historians -

what they always remember
are the small anecdotal details,

the very curious,
often unexplainable details.

The curiosities and the very dark
parts of his painting.

And if I ask them, "What painting
was it? Was it a crucifixion? Was it
Christ carrying the cross?"

They can't tell me. They can tell me
all about the details,

about a man growing out
of a strawberry or what have you.

So I think what's fascinating
about Bosch

is he's remembered
in all the intimate details

except for the main subject
of many of his paintings.

He still obviously has
a relevance today.

He's someone that people look to
and look at.

And even so many contemporary
artists have been inspired
by his work,

so I think he's someone that people
keep coming back to

and they keep getting something
from his paintings.

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