Hieronymus Bosch – Visions and Nightmares
Nils Buttner, Reaktion Books, £14.95

ACCORDING to psychologists at the University of Vienna, our appreciation of visual art is enhanced if work is open to multiple interpretations. When it comes to the painted image, we love an enigma.

In this accessible introduction to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Nils Buttner acknowledges that inscrutability is a factor in the Dutch painter’s enduring appeal. Buttner’s relish for the mysterious and multi-layered aspects of Bosch are, however, tempered with analytical enquiry.

From the outset, he notes the impact of scientific enquiry on perceptions of the artist. In 1937, forty-one paintings were attributed to Bosch; by 2013, dendrochronology and stylistic analysis had reduced the list to twenty. Within this redefined oeuvre, traditional Christian iconography is represented far more frequently than the "darkly fantastic" scenes for which he is best known.

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This development undermines popular theories which cast Bosch as heretic, psychopath, alchemist or proto psychoanalyst; but Buttner celebrates the persistence of mystery. While there is a considerable body of art, historical evidence that limits conjecture about the character and intentions of the painter, the scope for viewers to reflect on the meanings of his fantastic inventions is undiminished.   

By reflecting on contemporaneous documentation, Buttner constructs a detailed picture of Bosch’s affiliations, social status and beliefs. He was, we discover, born Jheronimus van Aken in the city of Hertogenbosch; he was from a line of comfortably off painters, and married a wealthy heiress; his paintings were collected by the nobility during his lifetime; and he was a fee-paying member of the elite inner-circle of a devout religious order, the Brotherhood of Our Lady.

For years, I was puzzled by the contradictory nature of Bosch’s status as precursor and inspiration to the Surrealist Movement. His influence on painters such as Carrington, Dali, Ernst and Miro was obvious, but few of them acknowledged him directly. The answer is embedded in Buttner’s analysis: Bosch’s wealth, fame, influence and piety would have played poorly with some surrealists.

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Elevated social status was, however, key to the development of a unique and powerful pictorial imagination. Buttner explains that freedom from the urgency of income generation gave Bosch the time to hone his technique and the confidence to take risks with style, subject matter and complexity. His apparently inexhaustible creativity stems from an ability to draw without definite purpose, and to paint without the need to dilute ideas to secure a sale.

The book includes 60 colour illustrations – some presenting complete works, others specific segments. The format is 215 x 140mm, so the reproductions of Bosch’s busy and complex images are necessarily compact. A magnifying glass is, therefore, required to fully appreciate the collisions of wonder, realism, awe and comedy in paintings such as The Temptation of St Anthony and The Haywain.

The detailed imagery of The Garden of Earthly Delights – widely held to be Bosch’s masterpiece – merits considerable attention. It has the wit and dynamism of the crowd paintings of James Ensor and Stanley Spencer, but with more blatant and unsettling psychosexual content. For example, the orgiastic elements of the painting’s central panel include multiple instances of anal penetration – by the beak of a bird, a flute and a bunch of flowers. In this last case, both the florist and recipient of his attention – who directly returns the viewer’s gaze – appear content in their activities. There are many other overt and implied sexual acts, as well as weird transformations. In the most spectacular of these, birds emerge from the skin of a giant fruit, which emanates from the groin of someone submerged headfirst in the still but steely-grey water of a lake. Some characters are chimeric – hybrids of human, animal and plant. 

In the right-hand panel, in the fires of Hell, the body horror intensifies. A hare-headed human is engaged in torture; a bird-headed figure presides over scenes of degradation while consuming a naked body. At the centre of the scene is a creature with an expressionless but clearly human face; its shattered eggshell torso, occupied by tiny human figures, is pierced by the thorn tree branches on which it stands. 

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Buttner believes the courtly audience for Bosch’s work in the early sixteenth century would have interpreted the central panel as an allegory of moral decline. The right-hand panel, widely seen as "the most impressive vision of hell in Western visual art," is uncanny in the Freudian sense. Its emotional power stems from the artist’s merging of the supernatural with cruelties that are all too familiar to a 21st-century audience. 

Modern viewers – even professors of art history – are unable to de-code every aspect of Bosch’s imagery in terms of the visual culture of the Renaissance. Buttner notes that symbols which once reflected straightforward moral concepts have been obscured by time: five centuries after the artist’s death, his stylistic innovations and extravagant imaginings have free reign in the human imagination.

Buttner has produced an entertaining illumination of Bosch’s work in the context of his life experiences, beliefs and the structure of the society in which he worked.