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On my last trip to Madrid I visited the Lázaro Galdiano Museum and among the works I discovered Meditations of Saint John the Baptist (1490), the work of the Dutch painter Hyeronymus Bosch, known as “Hieronymus Bosch”.
At the National Museum of El Prado, I stopped before the suggestive painting The Hay Cart (1500) or The Hell of Vices. In his works he presents the world of human desires and fears. He is one of the painters with the most fantasy and markedly pessimistic art, with terrifying representations of hell, which refers to the moral attitudes and religious concepts of the late Middle Ages.
His work is situated in the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, at a time of great ideological and religious tensions (internal corruption of the clergy, heretical sects, new currents of Neoplatonic thought). His paintings reflect those conflicts.
Jeroen van Aken or Hieronymus Bosch, known as Hieronymus Bosch (1450 in Bolduque, Netherlands – 08-09-1516, in Bolduque), belonged to a family of artisans. His training probably took place in the family workshop. He was part of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a secular institution founded in 1318 in which he joined and actively participated.
Hieronymus Bosch worked on the decoration of the chapel that the organization owned in the collegiate church, now the Cathedral of San Juan, and carried out various works commissioned by the brotherhood, including a triptych for its altarpiece.
The Brotherhood of Our Lady, which still exists, had a markedly spiritual character in the time of Hieronymus Bosch. The brothers who did not come from the city’s elite rose thanks to their training.
Around the year 1500, exceptionally, artists such as the master architect Jan Heyns, the musician Simon van Couderborch and the painter Hieronymus Bosch gained membership as a jury.
The chronology of his artistic production is unknown. In the first period they were more conventional works. The meditations of Saint John the Baptist (1490) corresponds to the left panel of the altarpiece of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Bolduque.
The scene represents Saint John the Baptist lying on a rock leaning on his left arm, wrapped in the red color of passion, meditating in solitude with his eyes half-closed in the middle of nature.
In the lush landscape, Hieronymus Bosch introduces strange geological formations and rare animal and plant species born from his imagination. The disturbing climbing plant that grows next to the saint, a passion flower or passion flower, hides the figure of a praying person and announces the Passion of Christ.
Its fruit contains reddish seeds on which a bird feeds, a symbol of the Christian soul, alluding to the drops of blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds, in clear reference to the Eucharist. Saint John the Baptist points to a lamb as the path to salvation.
At the center of his artistic career are his most famous achievements. A series of creations full of figures, outside the iconography of the time and set in imaginary landscapes and full of fantastic and monstrous elements, such as demons or half-human and half-animal figures,
One of his late works, The Hay Wagon, circa 1510-1515, is presented as a summary of Hieronymus’s works. It is a triptych made in oil on panel in which it represents human life as a journey full of vices and temptations. It inscribes the symbolism of hay in an allegory framed by the main acts of Creation and a representation of hell.
It represents a pilgrim stalked by the dangers of the journey, like the dog that is attacking him and he defends himself with a cane. Further down, there are animal bones.
A peasant plays the bagpipes sitting at the foot of a tree, where we can also see a crucifix on a small altar. Near him is lust, represented by a couple dancing to the music.
The left wing of the painting is dedicated to Creation, sin and the expulsion of Eve and Adam from paradise. It shows four different episodes: above, the fall of the rebellious angels, who as they fall change shape and take on the appearance of toads and insects. Below is the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. Even further down and to the right is Original Sin with the serpent with the head of a woman and clawed hands.
Finally, the expulsion from earthly paradise is crowned by a plant with thorns and various fruits, one of them pecked by a bird as a symbol of lust, while the thistle symbolizes the temptations of the senses.
On the right wing it presents hell and the punishment of sins. Hell is represented as an incandescent city, with devils dedicated to the construction of a tower, perhaps in reference to the biblical tower of Babel. The structure fires, so typical in Hieronymus Bosch’s work, are repeated here.
The center panel shows a scene of a hay cart. It is based on a text from the prophet Isaiah, which speaks of “how the pleasures and riches of the world are like the hay of the fields that quickly dry up and even sooner run out.” It symbolizes it as something ephemeral.
At the top of the cart, while a peasant couple kisses, a symbol of lust, they are watched by an owl, which symbolizes heresy or human blindness. Three characters are dedicated to the music, and a man observes the scene, to the right of which a blue demon with a proboscis nose and a peacock’s tail, a symbol of vanity, participates in the melody.
While on the left an angel turns towards Christ in heaven in a praying position. The owl and the devil can be understood as flattery and deception. Leading the procession that follows the chariot are the King of France, the Pope and the Emperor.
This hay cart is pulled by seven beasts, beasts and monsters where men are painted half lions, others half dogs, others half bears, half fish, half wolves, all symbols and figures of society; beats lust, avarice, ambition, bestiality, tyranny, sagacity and brutality.
The scene may be based on the Flemish proverb that says: “The world is a cart of hay, from which everyone takes what he can.”
Hieronymus Bosch was an artist who challenged the limits of his time and created works that still captivate and disturb us today. His unique style and disturbing vision of the world make him one of the great masters of medieval art.
