Flemish Primitives Part 1, Hieronymus Bosch

 

I spent a week’s holiday in Belgium, which afforded me the opportunity to visit a number of important galleries and soak myself in the work of the so-called Flemish Primitives, the early Netherlandish painters who flourished between the 15^th and 16^th centuries. I say “so-called” primitives, as their work is anything but primitive, rather being a school of sophisticated masterpieces by supremely talented individuals on mostly Christian but sometimes classical themes.

Thinking back, the work of perhaps the best known of these painters, Hieronymus Bosch, was one of my ways into classical Art when I was in my teens. I haven’t had much opportunity to see his work in the originals, there being one solitary, albeit astonishing, Bosch in the National Gallery; I did see a number in the Prado in Spain a few years ago, including the surprisingly small Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. Virtually the first painting I encountered in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels was the Temptation of St Anthony triptych, a much bigger series. I’d known this painting from book reproductions for half my life (we even used the figure of the bird with the letter as part of the publicity for my play Groping in the Dark) but seeing it up close and personal like this was thrilling. The work teams with vibrant detail and writhes with a terrible life. All three panels show scenes from the life of the early Church desert father St Anthony, who was assailed by the world, the flesh and the devil as he attempted to put his mind solely to Godly thoughts in his wilderness retreat. Bosch is a mysterious figure about whom little is known; one theory has it that he leaned towards a Cathar outlook and saw the material world as a stenching (all those decaying fish creatures!) thing of evil. Certainly in Bosch nature is prodigious in its production of horrors; figures mutate between the human, the demonic and the bestial, as if the world were merely a breeding ground for freaks, each one of which has its own peculiarities and quirks. The freaks torment, torture and prey on each other; there’s a curious attitude towards generation which suggests that the act of sexual congress produces this carnival of horrors in which the revellers get off on their terrible antics. The Saint must resist the blandishments of this world, which despite being horrific hold intense fascination. Only contemplation of the person of Christ and His sacrifice can take the Saint away from the demonic world and it takes an enervating effort to achieve communion with Christ (one of my favourite images in the painting, on the left panel, has Anthony being carried away by his companions, utterly exhausted). Even when the Saint appears in meditation in the right panel, his gaze is fixed on a table under which naked sinners are lost in violent, somnambulant revels – but here he has learned some distance, perhaps linking the Saint’s gaze with that of the ideal Artist, who can look at these things as mere vision; for whom the earth itself is a passing vision…

In Ghent, Bosch’s third and last and greatest version of Christ Carrying the Cross assaults the viewer with a vision of intense violence and hatred carrying on around a Jesus who, His mind entirely elsewhere, has transcended it despite still being physically a part of it. It is telling that all but one of the figures around Christ are male, testosterone-fuelled products of a brutal patriarchy against which only withdrawal to an inner world and passivity towards the outer aggression are the only answers. The one female figure is Veronica, who holds her veil on which Christ’s face has been miraculously implanted; she holds this out to the viewer and so Christ looks at us. This has a curious effect, as if I think of the veil with Christ’s face as a mirror, I also must widen my view and take the entire painting as a reflection; I wonder how much I contribute to this hell of aggression portrayed and how I can free myself from it. The aggressive world is timeless and ever-present, no matter what temporal ephemera happen to be around at any given moment; whether Christ (whatever He signifies) is the answer is another issue – the painting certainly posits the question of aggression with unwavering force. It is blindingly obvious that Bosch, in this painting and others, does not see the Church as a means to Christ, as the representatives of religion are themselves a part of the aggressive world and offer no solace; the good thief in the upper right corner swoons in terror at the words of his grisly confessor, who couldn’t be less Christ-like if he tried. The painting is a formal triumph, with Christ at the centre of a cross and the two thieves, Veronica and the hands of Simon of Cyrene at its four corners. I rather admire the gumption and resistance of the bad thief at the right lower corner but clearly it gets him nowhere and only adds to the ugliness of the scene.

Also in Ghent, Bosch’s St Jerome at Prayer echoes the theme of the St Anthony triptych but in a calmer key. St Jerome has abandoned the things of this world – his fine cloak, his book, his hat; he lies abject at the feet of his object of contemplation, Christ on the cross. The world around him is a complete wasteland, an emotional and physical dead end. Yet this desperate natural world cannot harm the Saint, as evidenced by the lion who has been turned here into little more than a gentle lamb.

In Bruges, Bosch’s Last Judgement triptych shows the world’s end. The last days are a war zone, with cities on fire and rats the size of cows in the streets. As ever, the prodigious demons torture the damned. Most medieval Last Judgements confine hell to the right hand corner  and give most space to the righteous and the Heavens above. Not so Bosch, for whom hell is almost the whole scene; his left hand panel is a calm scene where a few naked innocents are taught by angels or frolic in serenity and a single Gothic structure stands (in contrast to the many destroyed buildings in hell); there is also a hint here that a more positive vision of sexuality might be possible. According to Bosch, few will find a way out of hell, punishment, retribution which – if I for a moment apply a Blakean reading – can be seen a mindset rather than a physical place (although of course the mindset creates the physical into the embodiment of hell). For me, Bosch’s work is a vision of the mind in action, for the most part a terrible, tormented mind full of violence, enmity, sometimes strange pleasure but finally disease and death; yet there is an alternative mind of calm, knowledge, contemplation. Yet it takes tremendous efforts of concentration to take oneself from one to the other, and that other is always waiting with its pinchers to pinch and pull.

Bosch is the most extreme of the Flemish Primitives and whilst he sums up their vision is also anomalous in the fever pitch of his imagination. Like most of them he was a master craftsman with an enviable sense of composition and a mean ability to colour his scenes in vivid, striking tones. He’s a great place to start as his figures are so utterly indelible that once seen they are never to be forgotten. In my next blog, I’ll talk about some of his fellow Flemish Primitives, who give him some context and not a few of whom are geniuses in themselves. Yet I suspect he’ll always be my first love, who torments me with the most terrible and profound of loves.

Jerusalem and its Sites of Mythic Events...

My partner and I spent 7 days in Israel this in late August/early September, on vacation as the Americans would say or was it on Pilgrimage as a Medievalist might say? One thing is for sure, we weren't on a crusade. It is such a strange, alluring and complex part of the world that I want to write a blog or two on it, and this is the first; fragmented thoughts and scattered insights. Others will follow if I get the time…

We arrived at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport and, after my partner faced some reasonably stringent questioning (they didn't seem that bothered by me), we got a car to Jerusalem. Our first four nights were spent in The Holy City, and our first morning there was spent walking the Via Dolorosa. 

The Via Dolorosa is a walk through the winding streets of Old Jerusalem, which is still a walled city, with seven gates; we entered in through Damascus Gate. The Via Dolorosa supposedly traces the journey of Jesus from his condemnation by Pilate to his internment in the tomb. Each of the famous Stations of the Cross are marked on the route, some with a simple round medallion on the wall, some with a chapel or sanctuary. It's a fascinating walk to take, both for the sites  - some of the chapels are exquisite (for example the Church of the Flagellation with its beautiful stained glass and Crown of Thorns ceiling, or the Chapel of the Third Station, with its compelling paintings)  - and also the characters: the local traders trying every which way to make a dollar from the tourists & pilgrims, the former stopping to take photographs and the latter mostly in groups, singing hymns at each Station. This heady mix of money-making and tourism with sanctity and religiosity is the most palpable and peculiar flavour of Jerusalem, and it would be wrong to wish for it to be any other way. It's kind of a theme park where people go not simply for fun but for ecstasy and grace. I can't say I felt, at the time, any great spiritual affect – but being there is to be swept up into this very real and very present place which is at the same time very unreal and very Eternal. It is a kind of place where time and eternity meet but the effect of that happening is not what you might expect. One thing is for sure, it could only be Jerusalem.

I have a lot of time for the Gospels as Imaginative Art and I've done a fair bit of reading around the historical Yeshua-bar-Yosef, the various theories as to what really happened if any of it did, the "reality" behind the Myth. I suppose my take on this is relatively unusual, because for the Myth to work in me (and at times it does), there doesn't need to have been a literal reality. The Jesus of the Gospels exists in the words on the page and in the Imagination of the reader. Whether a first century Jewish holy man was the reality behind that Myth isn't essential, any more than whether some Theban tyrant really stands somewhere behind Oedipus. Of course, someone came up with the Parables, which seem to me quite extraordinary literary achievements, and someone stands behind the ideas; if Saul/Paul of Tarsus or some other early follower had made it all up, they would surely have credited themselves with the parables and ideas and claimed they were themselves Messiah; so the background figure I suspect strongly was a real person. This ambiguity I have as to the historicity of the figure is an ambiguity which is essentially writerly. As a writer myself, I might base this or that character or situation on a real person or event; I wouldn't want anyone to get too interested in the reality, as the story as I have written it is The Thing. The kick I get from finding out about the life of Yeshua-bar-Yosef is in seeing what the writers of the Gospels – clearly men of literary genius – did with it to turn it into this incredible Myth. That Yeshua-bar-Yosef was something of a literary and philosophical genius himself is an added layer of intrigue…

But how to approach Jerusalem, where real places are presented as mythic ones? The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains not only the supposed Sepulchre of the Resurrection but also the rock of Calvary and the place on which Jesus was laid to be perfumed and shrouded after death, the Stone of Unction. There are contested theories as to whether these places are the actual places, if the actual events took place (which is, to some more than others, a big if). I am made a little queasy by real land being made mythic in this way; the mapping of Imaginative space onto actual space kind of bothers me. Yet this sceptic wasn't always in place. Underneath an elaborate Greek Orthodox altar and glass case, one is presented by a rock which does indeed look like a skull. One doesn't see the rock until quite late as you approach the altar and, at that moment, I felt a palpable shock. One has to bend down in order to reach through and touch it and there in that moment I wondered "What will happen? Will some vision course through my mind, splitting it open? Will my heart burst with the kind of love St Teresa felt in her ecstasies? Will I be taken on a Trip of mind-altering, cosmic dimensions?" But it was just a cold rock I felt with my sense of touch, as it would be, and those not blessed with a spiritual moment or cursed with a schizophrenic one are left with their imagination to build on this place in that brief moment of touch and after, in contemplation and creativity. 

The Holy Sepulchre is more difficult to get one's head around. It is easy to believe that someone was crucified on that rock two millennia ago; it is somewhat harder to swallow that on the nearby site of the now elaborately covered Holy Sepulchre that same man came back to life. It is easy to take this in a myth – Tiresias changed his sex and Leda was raped by a swan, of course I agree with those story elements and can just as soon agree that Jesus came back to life; it is easy to take as a metaphor – after all, you can't kill an idea. But as a historical moment? This is where one needs faith and unless you have this with you already at the Holy Sepulchre, I doubt you'll find it in the Aedicule of the Sepulchre itself. Pilgrims and tourists are harried and herded, about 12 or 13 at a time, into the Aedicule and given a very limited time in the actual space (you pass through one chamber into another). There's little chance here for the trails of mystery and awe to weave themselves around one's mind. Perhaps thinking about the place later? In that case, might you as well not have gone, just Imagined? The literal presence of the places simply leads one back to the Imagination, where such events really take place. William Blake posited that all events take place in the Imagination…

Behind the Sepulchre there is an ante-room with a battered old altar and you can pass through this to the Tomb of Joseph of Arimethea, which unlike the Sepulchre has no ornate or any other decoration and therefore has rather more atmosphere (not many people venture in here, as an added plus). In this barren, unlit cave, crouching down, one can get strange intimations; you could believe that out of sight, out of mind,  a wondrously strange thing might happen here… The lack of decoration, the lack of light, the lack of others presents the Imagination with opportunities…

In retrospect, the walk along the Via Dolorosa and around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was an extraordinarily special thing to have done – whether or not one subscribes any truth to the legends about these places. These are rich sites from which have sprung stories and from which stories can and will continue to spring. The place of the skull though – that is a place in your head, and it is there ultimately that the Saviour will be crucified and might Rise Again; is it there all other mythic events, about Jesus and anything else, will ultimately take place… 

The crucifixions and resurrections that go on in your own mind will bleed and come back to life in the reality we share, which is after all the site of the meeting of minds.