Original subtitles

We're in the Netherlands, in the 15th century, in the workshop of a

revolutionary painter, Hieronymus Bosch.

There are few remaining traces of his life.

By turns, he has been considered a genius, an avant-gardist, and also a

heretic, influenced by a secret society.

He had access to the rarest documents. He rubbed shoulders with the greatest

figures. princes and scholars alike.

He was forgotten for two centuries, then resurrected, and he is surely the

world's foremost surrealist. Only 26 paintings have been left to us, all

painted on wooden panels.

Most are triptychs, which were displayed in churches.

They were kept shut six days out of seven, and on the seventh day, Sunday,

they were opened to be presented to the faithful.

The best known among them... is the Garden of Earthly Delights, the most

enigmatic work by Hieronymus Bosch. In the center, little naked figures indulge

in the pleasures of life.

But on the right, punishment and death lie in wait.

This descent into the underworld, into the chaos of hell, contributed to his

being dubbed the Devil Maker.

But was that really all he was?

In all his work, Hieronymus Bosch used medieval symbols, but he broke from the

medieval world with his most sacrilegious call for a new man.

Nonetheless, the church never bothered him.

The Bosch mystery remains intact.

We know he was born around 1450 with the last name Van Acken in the Netherlands,

in the city of Sertogenbosch.

At the time, the city was an important commercial and cultural crossroads in

the region, after Brussels and Antwerp.

The city was protected by heavy doors to the many canals which funneled traffic

towards the centre.

Hieronymus Bosch was born into a humble family of painters, originally from

Aachen. In the 15th century, the Van Aachen dynasty was at its peak.

and moved on to the main market square.

Bosch lived there first with his family, and then later with his wife.

After working in his father's atelier, he had his own somewhere in the center

of the city.

Hieronymus Bosch only left Sertogenbosch once in his life.

He didn't travel, although it was customary for artists to do so at the

time. The world came to him.

From the evidence of what Bosch's life in Sertogenbosch was like,

and from the evidence of his relatives, it does seem that he lived, at least on

the surface, a very pious life, a life which involved his membership in the

most elite of religious confraternities of his city and probably one of the most

elite confraternities or brotherhoods of his whole northern culture.

So we know that Bosch, therefore, was at the heart of what one might call

orthodox late medieval piety, based in group activities, but also

intensely invested in private looking at who you are and what your

inner state is and how sinful you are in a sort of public way, also confession

and penance and so forth.

The illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady brought together the city's

intellectual, commercial and political elites and had influence all over

Europe. In 1478, the marriage of Hieronymus Bosch to Aled van de Merven,

one of the city's great aristocrats, guaranteed him financial ease and higher

social status and helped him reach the highest level of the Brotherhood. He

became a sworn member.

A sworn brother at the time of Jérôme Bosch was to celebrate very

regularly masses and religious services in the cathedral.

And if I say very regularly, it was five times a week.

There were all the holidays dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

There were meetings here in this building with his colleagues.

They took meals together.

They probably discussed religious and

sociocultural issues.

It is perhaps necessary to take into account that the members of this

confederacy at the time of Jérôme Bosch were aristocrats, men of the world. And

the sign was the symbol of wealth, of nobility.

Hieronymus Bosch became the official painter of the Brotherhood.

He held banquets in his home and made strong friendships with its members, who

came from all over Europe.

Religion was indisputably one of the cornerstones of his life and his work.

Most of his paintings depict biblical scenes.

The Passion of Jesus Christ, Hell, Saints Facing Temptation,

and Genesis.

to be sure to remember the original sin.

In his paintings, Bosch used religious symbols common during the Middle Ages

and understandable by all at the time.

Fish, for example, very present in his work in all its forms, symbolised Christ

as our saviour.

The goldfinch symbolizes the passion of Jesus Christ.

Legend has it that the bird, seeing Christ suffering under his crown of

thorns, tried to remove it.

Spattered by the blood of Christ, it was given red plumage in return.

From that day on, its head was scarlet to commemorate the passion.

It is associated with thistle flowers, which symbolize Christ's crown.

In the Middle Ages, there were symbols everywhere.

In this painting, Saint John is alone on the island of Patmos, lost in his

vision. At his feet, the eagle watches over the pen and ink he uses to record

miracles. On the right, the devil wants to seize them. The fire on his head

symbolises his infernal origins.

Bosch gave him short arms to prevent him from snatching the inkpot.

His body is composed of hybrid animals bundled together in heavy armour.

In the background, a blue-tinged landscape peppered with marshes gives

depth to the painting by clearly separating the background from the

foreground. Here, he transposes his village to represent Greece.

In many paintings, versions of Sertogenbosch and its surroundings also

serve as a setting for scenes of daily life, village games, peasants and

fishermen, but also spitefulness, vanity and the transience of earthly things.

Bosch was an attentive observer of daily life and depicted human behaviour with

precision.

If I were to send a person to one painting to understand all of Bosch's

work, I would certainly send them to the so-called Seven Deadly Sins and Four

Last Things on the Prado. What you have is representation of the world.

beautiful in its funniness and its careful detailing of what people are

like and what people do in the form of seven scenes of sin. These aren't

allegorical scenes. They're sin enacted in everyday life. A person overeating

with his son with a sort of scrofulous hair trying to get some of the food and

somebody bringing in more food. Enablers, we would call them, for

somebody's overeating. All that goes on.

What do we learn from that? We learn that Bosch is the greatest and first

genre painter in the history of European art, all those little scenes of everyday

life. We know that those genre scenes are about sin, but there are also more

than that. They're humorous, cruel, interesting to look at. But we also know

that the whole picture that he paints is one which is there to warn you, beware,

beware. And that's the essence of Bosch. Every one of his pictures should have a

label, beware, beware.

Maybe God sees, maybe Bosch sees, maybe the devil sees, but somebody is seeing

you before you see them.

Good only exists in relation to evil, and evil in relation to good.

Bosch linked the two by using religious symbols known to all.

Thus he created an ambiguity.

which tilts first towards hell, then towards heaven.

God creates first the angels and then mankind.

And when he creates the angels, he creates Lucifer, actually, the prince of

the angels.

But Lucifer vies with God, is disobedient. He is filled with hubris,

with pride. He wants to be like God.

Because of that, God...

punishes him, is throwing him out of the heavens with all the angels that follow

Lucifer. They fall into the earth and while they fall into the earth they

transform from angels into devilish monsters.

That transformative force is the force that infects the

entire world.

the entire even dream world as we humans want it, and how it transforms God's

creation into, if you will, the creation of Lucifer.

We can ask oneself, what part of the Christian message does Bosch most

focus upon?

Christianity is a religion, we think, of love.

Christianity which also can be a religion of hostility.

I would say that Bosch lies over in the hatred side of religion.

That doesn't mean he as a person necessarily lay at the hatred side of

religion. It's meant that his art as an artist, as a person who makes images,

tended to inhabit that darker side of the religious iconography.

Hieronymus Bosch emphasized this ambiguity by including in his paintings

esoteric symbols only comprehensible to a few, the initiated.

In the case of the Saint Jerome in Ghent, he's praying, mentally he's

focused on the crucifix that he holds in his arms.

And this crucifix may very well, and the prayers that he's singing may very well

be protection against

what this cave and this strange skull at the top of it may represent.

Namely, the mouth of hell.

But actually the suggestion is that this skull is looking at you.

In this painting, the skull isn't the only thing watching us.

There's also the owl, motionless and wide-eyed.

It's prayer blind.

while the owl itself sees clearly into the darkness of the subconscious and

into the human soul.

Owls are ambivalent creatures.

Sometimes they're seen as symbols of wisdom, but I think on the whole we can

say that owls are negative creatures related to the darkness, to

night, to very closely to witchcraft.

In medieval bestiaries, those books of animals, they're listed with the most

abject creatures.

Owls are very present in the work of Hieronymus Bosch.

Some experts agree that they represent a kind of artist's signature.

My favorite owl is the owl at the geometric center of the Eden

panel of the Garden of Delights, who looks out at us from the darkness.

Very eerie and unpleasant moment in the picture.

Bosch liked the interplay of glances.

Sometimes they're clear and sometimes cleverly disguised.

You see a strange rock physiognomy of which the contours clearly show a nose

and the snakes forming the individual features of the face are drawn in such a

way that you see thick lips formed by a snake.

It's shaped by strange animals, weird dark forms.

If you look at it from the point of view of dream, you start to think, well, this

is not just a face, it's actually a sleeping face.

You have this strange animal that forms the eye.

And he is facing the fountain.

It's not just the regular fountain of life that you find in late medieval

representations of the creation scene, but it's actually perhaps a

fountain of death in disguise.

because the black owl in the heart of this fountain was a well-known symbol of

the devil.

Hieronymus Bosch's imagination was profoundly marked by the late Middle

Ages when death was omnipresent.

In 1463, a fire partially destroyed the city of Sertorgenbosch and its

cathedral.

Hieronymus Bosch was only 13 at the time.

All over Europe, the plague, famines and wars ravaged cities and decimated

populations, and the church governed through terror.

In 1478, it was the dawn of the Spanish Inquisition, the recapture of Muslim

territories by Christians, the expulsion of Jews, and the construction of a

national identity based on the Catholic faith.

Clearly, Bosch had many special areas of expertise.

expertise in the machinery of torture and torment, a virtual craftsman's

knowledge of how you put together a torture machine, how you might envision

the most terrible torture you can possibly imagine.

All those imaginings have a kind of dual origin, on the one

hand, in the fantastical imagination of an artist.

And Bosch is very much one of those artists whose fantasy is most active and

who was beloved already in his time for being the master of the fantastical. But

there's a real-world aspect as well where he knows how to build a machine.

And the particular machines he builds are often... machines of torment and it

does ask the question you know how many such machines did he actually see or how

did how close was he to the machinery of inquiry of violent inquiry

Meanwhile, Constantinople fell into the hands of the Ottomans after a relentless

siege. Scholars fled the city for Italy, carrying with them precious texts from

antiquity.

Bosch paints these symbols of Islam, the crescent moon. He's, I think,

anticipating, terrifying.

his public with the idea of what would the world look like if in fact Islam

would overtake Europe and all the flags of the different principalities would be

taken down and these new flags of the enemies would be unfurled. So the real

threat of Islam gets mixed in with the phantasmagorical threat of sin and the

devil.

During this period, not just with Bosch, but with other artists and writers,

there was a strong and accepted level of what one might

call anti-clerical sentiment, a sense that the clergy, in

the way they...

lived in how they acquired wealth, in the fact that they, supposedly being

celibate, were in fact engaged in sexual activity, that the clergy and the people

who had taken orders were a corrupt order and therefore it enabled artists

or gave artists an impulse to represent them in critical ways.

In Sertogenbosch, Hieronymus Bosch's life was set to the pace of the

religious services of the Brotherhood.

To fill its coffers, the church sold letters of indulgence, which allowed the

faithful to lessen their penance for their sins.

Having witnessed these practices, Bosch gradually distanced himself from

Christian morality ruined by a church, greedy for earthly possessions, to

invent an entirely personal humanist morality.

Bosch began to compose his own music.

The whole world lives in darksome night, in blinded sinfulness persisting, while

every street sees fools existing.

They know not folly to their shame, yet will not own to folly's name.

Hence I have pondered how a ship of fools I'd suitably equip.

That is the first sentence of The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brandt, printed in

1494, which was virulently critical of society.

Hieronymus Bosch too began his own ship of fools.

Twelve people around a table, on a ship adrift.

On top of the tree-shaped mast, an owl keeps watch.

Meanwhile, in southern Europe, in Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and

Raphael were at their peaks.

In the north, the uncontested masters were Van Eyck, Durer and Holbein.

It was the dawn of the Renaissance.

Erasmus, a humanist writer, wrote in Praise of Folly a criticism of various

social categories, particularly monks and the high clergy.

He passionately defended man's free will, reason and faith.

Erasmus even wrote, I'd like to be a citizen of the

world.

Thanks to printing, the texts were translated into the people's languages

and disseminated throughout Europe.

Printing was the work of a German engineer, Gutenberg.

The first printed book was the Bible in 1455.

The first bestseller was Sebastian Brandt's book The Ship of Fools.

Bosch takes some of those themes that Sebastian Brant and the literature of

folly produces, both in literary and in visual forms, and he introduces it into

his work and gives it a new spin.

So he takes the form of religious art and he substitutes the usual centre

of those works, which would be a saint or the virgin.

or Christ with something that is taken from the secular literature of folly.

The funnel worn upside down on his head marks the man as a doctor for lunatics.

He slices his patient's skull with a knife to extract the stone of madness.

Here it's not a stone, but a flower, a tulip.

The book the nun is wearing on her head symbolizes the erroneous use made of

medical knowledge.

The extraction of the stone of madness shows the credulity, the absurdity,

which leads men in the hands of a charlatan surrounded by dubious

religious figures.

Bosch shows religious figures.

engaged in sinful activities in what are clearly negative scenes, and

also that in general his work has a feeling that

church art itself is a problematic entity.

For example, in the Temptation of St. Anthony is a world where all the

religious artifacts are all cleared away and piling in

our devils and heretics and enemies.

Sometimes in Bosch's paintings, religious symbols are discreet, giving

way to his extraordinary imagination.

His works are alive with bizarre creatures, monsters and countless hybrid

animals of all kinds.

Nonetheless, Hieronymus Bosch's extraordinary imagination was fed by the

knowledge of the time.

Through the Brotherhood, he met many scientists, philosophers and artists

from all over Europe.

He was drawn to humanist circles, to Erasmus' thinking, to Thomas More and to

new scientific discoveries.

Bosch certainly had access to a treatise by Polish astronomer Nikolaus

Copernicus. well before its publication in 1530.

Copernicus demonstrated that it wasn't the Earth, as it was believed at the

time, but the Sun, which was at the centre of the universe, and that the

planets revolved around it.

That implies a world order in which humans were no longer at the centre of

everything.

In his paintings, Bosch alludes to this revolution.

this absolute challenge to the church's explanation of the world through the

observation of the stars.

Europe went from a closed world to an infinite world.

In 1486, the Sultan of Egypt presented a giraffe to Lorenzo de' Medici.

It was the first giraffe in Europe.

The Medici court in Florence immediately invited sketch artists to come and draw

it.

It was a young giraffe which had a habit of eating the flowers on the second

floor balcony.

The giraffe in the Garden of Earthly Delights is an exact copy of one of the

drawings from the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in search of a new route to

India, and he discovered the American continent.

We do know that Europe-wide those stories about landfall,

that it couldn't have passed an artist interested in the imaginary.

and interested in the global and picturing the global as Hieronymus

Bosch.

There was a time when Bosch was believed to have been a provincial painter,

painting either for himself or for a small group of initiates, all deeply

religious. This might have been the case early in his career, but there's... no

evidence for it. What we do know is that Philip the Fair of Burgundy, the founder

of the Habsburg dynasty and the most powerful man in Northern Europe at the

time, commissioned a work from Bosch representing the Last Judgment, and he

prepaid him for that picture, which is unheard of at the time.

And we do know that Philip II of Spain, who was this obsessive collector of

Bosch, had this painting, Seven Deadly Sins, in his place of prayer in the

monastery of El Escorial.

And if you ever go to the Escorial and walk through the king's chambers, you'll

see that that room lies in the centre between, on the one hand, his ability to

see... into the sacred space of the basilica and watch mass being

celebrated.

On the other hand, he's able to see out a window, out towards the Spanish

countryside and beyond that towards the world over which he rules.

And between those two worlds lies the enigmatic picture.

King Philip II of Spain bought five paintings from him, contributing to his

renown. The artist's workshop expanded.

He worked with many painters, including his brother and his nephews. He adopted

the artist's name of Bosch in honour of his city, Sötterngenbosch, of which he

became one of the most respected men.

Although they are rare, documents attesting to this have been found.

Bosch is certainly a revolutionary artist in many, many regards.

Not just the fact that...

the imagination is given this huge palette of expression

in his art, but I think also things that are rarely talked about but are

immediately apparent, namely in the way he paints.

Bosch is inarguably the first great artist of drawings in the entire

European tradition.

There are other artists who drew, most famously Dürer, amazing artist as a

draftsperson. Leonardo did amazing drawings that treat the whole sheet of

paper as a little world and that do so with the spontaneous form of invention.

The triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights is the perfect example.

His painting is brimming with fabulous drawings.

which transport us into the fantastic world of Hieronymus Bosch.

For this painting, commissioned by one of the Counts of Nassau in Brussels

around 1500, Bosch drew inspiration from a very famous poem of the time, The

Romance of the Rose.

It's the story of a man who dreams of entering a garden to court his beloved.

He has to face his inner demons.

represented by allegorical figures.

The painting seemed to play with our imagination, with our visual memories of

what we had seen of other images at the time. If the painter plays his game with

us then we start to understand that this is more like a machina. It's a machine.

It's a memory and imagination machine that not necessarily wants to

bring home one particular point, but allows us and actually stimulates to

create a whole variety of interpretations.

So it is like a television program, not just one single episode, but

a seven-year series of...

of all kinds of episodes and events that happen at the same time in this one

single painting.

The left panel shows paradise on earth, architectural mountainous landscapes

with animals from another place.

A giraffe, an elephant, a white unicorn symbolizing power and purity.

Adam is sitting at the foot of the tree of knowledge.

God, holding her by the hand, introduces Eve.

Behind her, a little rabbit, a symbol of the fertility to come.

At the bottom of the frame, a few hybrid monsters, accompanied by a black

unicorn, the most evil of unicorns. The fall exists within paradise itself.

The right panel shows hell.

Humans are prey to beasts, demons and other men.

In the centre, the tree man turns back to us as though to ask a question.

What have we done to the world?

In the painting, it's the central panel which is the most enigmatic.

It teems with hybrid animals in lush nature.

Giant strawberries and grapes, sumptuous flowers, but above all a crowd of naked

young people, perhaps Adam and Eve's children, delighting in the pleasures of

the flesh.

The erotic aspect of the painting gives our whole process of understanding, of

interpretation, this sucking out of the nectar of meaning, not just a kind of a

mental aspect, but it turns it entirely into a bodily, synesthetic event where

all our senses are involved.

So this painting involves, if you will, as much our

interpretive capabilities of our nose and our taste and

of our hands as much as of our minds.

The center, you see this blue fountain, and if you look very carefully, it also

has a hole in it.

Namely, there's a woman who is, forgive me the language, taken from behind by

another person, while a person standing next to her reaches with his hand to her

vagina.

And while she is pointing with her left hand to the arse of another man, a naked

man, who has turned his arse towards her.

The painter does not rely too much on the imagination of the viewer, but

actually depicts a sexual act of a dubious nature that, if you will, is an

emblem of what is going on in more imaginative fashions all throughout The

Garden of First Delights.

A bunch of men, naked men.

making all kinds of weird gestures, strange postures and poses, standing on

strange animals, riding strange animals, swirling around a pool of naked women.

We know from late medieval images that there was a particular habit in court

festivities to ask a woman to hold an apple or another treasure in her hand.

She would stand in the middle and then The courtiers would be invited to dance

around her, making all kinds of strange gestures.

And the person who would make the man, who would make the weirdest gestures,

would win the prize.

The prize is not only the fruit that the woman has in her hands, the prize is the

woman as the fruit.

He was able to paint all kinds of rather obscene scenes, not to say perhaps

slightly pornographic.

And what is surprising is that the Church, as an institution, has never,

never even said a word to Jérôme Bosch by saying, listen, now you're going

too far in your painting, in your symbols.

That's something that's quite interesting.

not to say surprising, especially since we believe that this Jerome Bosch was a

very believing man.

Despite Hieronymus Bosch's virulent criticism of the church, it never took

aim at him.

He passed away in 1516, probably from the plague, leaving no descendants.

At his funeral, his coffin was carried through the doors of St. John's

Cathedral by members of the Brotherhood.

His work was so popular that right after his death, many artists inspired by his

paintings followed in the master's footsteps.

It's sometimes even hard to tell whether a given work is by a follower or by the

master himself.

Hieronymus Bosch inspired Salvador Dali, Magritte and a great many others.

André Breton saw him as a total visionary, writing, his work, Forgotten

No Longer, challenges the very foundations of the art of painting.

Five centuries after the death of Hieronymus Bosch, his most famous

painting is undoubtedly the most viewed in the world.

The Garden of Earthly Delights continues to inspire new interpretations and

resonates today more than ever.

And I think that this painting occurs most naturally when you stand in front

of the painting with a group of people, not by yourself.

You are being asked to engage in a conversation with other people about the

painting. The term conversation means not so much speaking to each other, but

being engaged in bodily and corporeal activities, especially play, especially

when it regards the conversation about love.

It does not represent the imaginary world of the painter.

but it represents the imaginary world of the people.

So it is your mind and everyone's mental world that he somehow tries to capture

in this painting, rather than his own imaginations.

water forms a human shape lying in the landscape, reminding us of the Vitruvian

Man by Leonardo da Vinci, the original Renaissance man.

Just like him, Bosch was always able to convey the upheavals of his time, the

violence, discoveries and ideas about faith.

Aren't humans still the same after all?

Aren't they driven by the same passions?

Don't they burn with desire?

Don't they seek a justice greater than that of men?

Don't they dare rise up against injustice and abandon?

And doesn't the devil botch have angel's wings?

you