Original subtitles

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 to 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 drawing of Jerome's Bosch in his native town so we had to

find a way to get the other museums prepared to 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 Jerome's Bosch we have only about 24 25 paintings left of Bosch so it's a very

limited amount of paintings and when you organize an exhibition

on a painter like Bosch you want to have as many pictures as possible

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 curators whether they would cooperate

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 of

them here and from the 20 drawings attributed to him we have 19 here in our

exhibition so it's that's a tremendous success

the visitors were attracted by by the number of works of art that we brought together here in

his native town and well the rest is history I think in in asking for the loans the museum

were very clever and that they made it clear that they wanted to bring so many works back into the

past in which they were created which always brings you brings new insights into a work

just seeing them also amassed together um as one uh 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 catalogs this is the only

moment where we have let's let's say two dozen works in one room we can make those sorts of

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?

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 wait?

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.

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.

I think that Bosch wasn't an intellectual,

but he was a man with a good education.

The fact that so many of his paintings have sources in books,

well, the stories of his time, part of the popular culture,

but also of the more highbrow literature,

shows that he did a lot of reading

and that he knew the mythology and the stories,

of course, especially of the Bible,

and he put them in his paintings.

His home was, at the time of Hieronymus Bosch,

wasn't a very big city.

It was a city mainly of tradesmen,

but of course there 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 precisely in his paintings.

He saw dogs, he saw horses passing by,

and 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.

He was creative, he was original,

and that makes him one of the most important painters

of the late medieval period

and the beginning of the Renaissance.

Comparing him with other artists

of the 15th and 16th century

shows him as an outstanding artist

who had the creativity of Leonardo,

but in quite another sense.

I would say that Bosch's imagination

is deeply rooted in the vocabulary

of the medieval world.

But what he does with it is carry it further

so that it does become strikingly modern.

Bosch, for instance, I would say,

is the first artist who truly paints the imagination,

who really lets his imagination run riot

and then provides us with a vision for it.

And as such, you see an entire world

unfurling from him, an entire new world.

I mean, would we have had Goya without him?

Would we have had the expressionists, the surrealists?

Would we have had half of Brit art

without that man opening up that world

that lies inside the most fantastical parts of our skull?

First of all, what's very important,

he exists in a confraternity of painters,

people who know how to paint,

know about materials, know about distribution,

know who pays for them.

It's all part of a, you know, phenomenology

which existed probably with his grandfather.

Certainly with his father.

And he was obviously very, very capable too.

Bosch was a religious man.

He was a lay person.

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.

He sent his message about

the way the people should live on

and try not to follow the devil with his temptations.

And in that way, he was like a preacher.

I think it's very popular 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...

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'd been taught to believe

by their church and by their society.

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 emphasize 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 Redempto,

Christ Redeemer, save us.

The picture originally had a donor family

painted into the front section,

which was largely scraped away

and overpainted at an early stage.

When the panel was restored in 1983,

it was decided to remove the old overpainting

and to restore the balance of the original composition.

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 emphasized by his bloody footprint

left on the ground.

In the early Middle Ages,

the city of Sertogenbosch

was full of cloisters,

clergymen,

and one out of three inhabitants

was one way or another linked to the church.

We are here in the so-called

Swan Brotherhood house,

which originally has been created

in 1318 by the Prince Bishop of Jerz

as a Marian devotional fraternity.

The illustrious lady.

What we know about Jeronimus 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.

The word swan has become

part of the tradition of those members

as the noblemen in the early 16th century

had large properties

and they brought for the yearly meal

swans, which they shot on their own grounds.

And that's the reason

it became Swan Brothers,

which is quite confusing

because the official name

is the Brotherhood of the Illustrious Lady.

The fact that a son of a craftsman

became a member of the Brotherhood

of our illustrious lady

is quite unusual.

The fact that he had commissions

by Philip the Fair, his duke,

by noblemen like the Count of Nassau,

Lord of Breda,

that shows that he was more or less

accepted in the high layers of society.

He was more or less accepted.

Where I'm sitting now,

Bosch would certainly have sat.

He would have been here

listening to these services.

And it should be understood that

these services might even be seen

as the beginning of our modern concert life.

That is, if you see the dimensions

of this chapel,

it's actually quite small.

You would hear the music very clearly.

The confraternity of our illustrious lady

was involved with creating works of art

for the church.

They had beautiful things.

This building that we're in

was a beautiful creation that was made

as part of the devotional life.

And in that connection,

painters were engaged,

sculptors were engaged,

but also composers were engaged

to create beautiful music

to adorn the sacred worship.

Each confraternity would be charged

with a specific task.

For example, some might be responsible

for the burial of the dead.

Others might be responsible

for the celebration of a particular saint,

and that would require a proper celebration

of their feast day,

including processions

and sometimes staging sacred plays,

commissioning music and ephemeral artworks.

And in the case of the Brotherhood

to which Bosch belonged,

they were specifically responsible

for perpetuating,

for promoting the cult of the Virgin.

And so they actually had a chapel

in the Church of St. John

dedicated to the illustrious Virgin.

And this is one of the altars

that Bosch decorated

with his altarpiece panels.

The altarpiece commissioned by the Brotherhood

of the Illustrious Lady

consists of a series of hinged panels,

of which only a few survive today.

Three painted panels by Bosch

and two carvings by Adrian von Wesel.

So these are double-sided wings,

and on one side of one wing

we have the figure of St. John of Pap.

And on the wing of the other

we have John the Baptist.

This is quite interesting

because both are St. John's,

obviously reflecting the dedication

of the Church.

The Church was actually dedicated

to John the Evangelist.

And it's worth just thinking about

when we look at John of Patmos today.

Many theologians now believe

that John the Evangelist

is not the same as John of Patmos.

But in that period in the medieval

and through the Renaissance period,

that was believed to be one and the same person.

It's also very neatly a reflection

of the interests of the Brotherhood,

who of course were dedicated

to the cult of the Virgin.

John, when he's on the Isle of Patmos in Greece,

he experiences a vision.

This is what is recounted

in the Book of Revelation.

And within that vision,

he describes seeing a woman

surrounded by stars and holding a child.

Sometimes she's described

as pregnant with a child.

And this is often interpreted

in later periods as a representation

of the Virgin and Child.

So you have this neat combination

of both John, John the Evangelist in this case,

and the Virgin Mary and Child.

Bosch has painted a small bird of prey,

the eagle, symbol of St. John,

on the ground in front of the Evangelist,

together with a pen case

and ink pot at his feet.

And behind him, an insect-like demon

with a human head.

The monster's belly and right wing

are pierced with arrows.

It holds its little arms up

helplessly in the air,

and a small fire smoulders on its head.

The confidence with which

he demonstrates his artistry

is shown here by what is believed

to be a self-portrait

on the face of the small monster

painted above his own signature.

In the John of Patmos panel,

John is immediately recognisable,

and the iconography is very familiar

from earlier and later works.

So in that case,

Bosch doesn't depart greatly

from artistic tradition.

In the case of the John the Baptist panel, however,

I think he very consciously

inserts the lamb in the foreground,

because I think without that lamb,

we could not identify that recumbent saint.

And in fact, it's very, very rare

to find an image of John the Baptist

lying on the ground in that way.

He's normally standing,

he's normally very active,

he has his mouth open,

he's pointing,

and there are many things

in John the Baptist's iconography

that render him immediately recognisable.

And all of these are distilled

into the one figure of the lamb

in Bosch's panel.

The idiosyncratic elements

of Bosch's painting

are the things that fascinate everyone,

but I think they're not haphazard.

And I wouldn't want to say that

each contained kind of symbolic meanings,

but there's something about the inclusions

in the backgrounds of his paintings,

for example, in the John the Baptist,

the inclusion of the wild animals

that seem to speak to the history

of John the Baptist,

the narrative of his life.

For example, he doesn't fail to include a river,

which immediately makes one think

of the River Jordan.

And he has little animals drinking from that river,

being provided for by that river.

And the curious inclusion of the bears

in the background,

a lot of people have been upset

by that image of the bear

tearing into its prey.

But of course,

this is a representation of the wilderness.

This is Bosch's way of telling us

this is a place known,

not inhabited by humans.

This is not a tame cityscape.

This is the wilderness.

This is where John the Baptist lived.

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,

in new things.

And 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 painted 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 an 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.

A piece of Latin text

is quoted as a motto

at the top of Bosch's most famous

and curious drawing.

It translates as,

Paul is the mind that always uses

the inventions of others

and invents nothing itself.

A dead tree stands prominently

in the middle of the drawing

with an oversized owl

perching in a hollow,

peering out of the picture plane.

A second hollow at the foot of the tree

contains a fox and a cockerel.

A group of young blossoming trees

stand immediately to the rear

of the dead trunk,

forming a copse

in which we make out

two large human ears.

All this vegetation grows

on a hilly field

in which seven human eyes can be seen.

The owl is found over and over again

in Bosch's imagery

and must therefore have been very important

to what the artist was seeking.

He generally used it

as an ominous symbol,

placing it in context

with an atmosphere of menace.

There is an old proverb that goes,

the field has eyes,

the wood has ears.

I want to see,

keep silent,

and hear.

Early 1500s,

most people were illiterate.

So I think what he's doing

is taking all the information

and all the proverbs,

all the sayings,

all the homilies

of current speech

which existed

certainly all over

northwestern Europe.

Some forms of low German

were spoken all the way

from Calais to Moscow,

so it was a pretty universal language.

And in order to talk again

with his particular religious beliefs

to people for understanding,

he wasn't going to do it

in words he knew,

which the way,

the disciplines he knew

in pictures.

His draftsmanship

is really striking.

Very little survives.

This exhibition brought

almost all the drawings

that we know by him together.

They're absolutely beautiful,

not just as pencil

and chalk drawings,

but in what they reveal

of how very precisely

he thought out,

how he worked out motifs,

how he observed

with a sharp, acute eye,

and then adapted

and played

and planned.

So it almost tied in for me

his work with the invention

of printing,

and at the same time

you read them visually.

It's as if he's making a language

which you see him formulating

in his drawings,

a very strict visual language.

Be warned and know

that by looking at this

and by understanding

that this is the way

that you live,

I'm asking you

to re-examine your life

so that you can take responsibility

for your life.

And try to live a better way.

Bos 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

and how to think about life

for yourself.

If Hieronymus Bos

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 was known

there was an organist

in this building.

And we have lots of records

of instruments,

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 color,

and when you put more

in voices together,

it makes it even more complex

and more ornate.

The difference between

polyphony and plain chant

is that plain chant

is single voice music.

You could say in some ways

that Bosch's experience

of polyphony, of this music,

could have influenced

the way that he painted.

His painting, to a certain extent,

is very polyphonic.

There's a lot going on.

There are storylines

going in all different directions.

It could be even a criticism

of his painting

compared to the clarity

of the Italian painters

of the time.

There's a lot of detail.

There's almost too much happening.

It's what makes it fabulous

and fascinating to look at,

but it makes it difficult

to look at.

And the same things were said

about polyphony at the time.

It's too busy.

There's too much going on.

So I think in that sense

that Bosch could very well

have been inspired

by the music that he would have

heard in his chapel.

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.

The idea of purification

is alluded to in a detail

in the background,

where a woman washes

her clothes in the river.

They are the same immaculate white

as Jerome's robe

and Christ's loincloth.

Jerome's intimacy with Christ

is an important element

which distinguishes it

from other images

of the penitent saint.

For me, Bosch is

a very interesting artist

because he was painting

in such a different way

from other artists around him

in his time.

He was able to create,

in some cases,

completely new imagery

and completely new iconography,

and that speaks to his great talent

and the types of iconography.

He really is inventing

entirely new signs and symbols

for telling stories

in painting in particular.

So that makes him

a very, very inventive artist,

incredibly alluring

and very different

from the artists

working around

the same time as him.

For example, Leonardo

or Michelangelo,

who was producing

the Sistine ceiling

around the same time.

If you're looking at him

as a painter whose paintings

are fundamentally warnings,

they're telling people

what might happen to them,

he has to make them feel real.

He has to put them

not as a far-distant prospect,

but to root them deeply

in the life

of the medieval peasant.

What is always sort of,

for instance,

I don't know,

sticking a sort of funnel

on people's head,

like a sort of something

you would filter something

in the kitchen through.

God knows what that means.

I think if you were living

in that era,

you would have recognised

everything, you know,

the way a beetle's back gleams,

the scales of the fish,

the whiskery bits of a rat,

the joints of an insect.

They're all there,

meticulously observed,

but then transmuted

and put together

in an incredibly sort of

surrealistic way,

joined together to make monsters,

which are then monsters

of the mind.

So the mind is rooted in reality.

It's an extraordinary

psychological trick,

the like of which

we've never seen before.

He makes the visionary real

through this extraordinary

way of working.

Bosch was living in a time

and in a city where

fear was everywhere.

There was, of course,

in that period,

possibility of plagues

and fires, poor harvests.

The fact that Sertum Bosch

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

Count of Nassau

and all those other

important advisers

from the Burgundian court

came to Sertum Bosch

and had the opportunity

to visit Bosch in a studio.

This dramatic triptych

has been in Venice

for over 350 years.

And represents the crucifixion

of a female saint,

Vilge Fortis.

The left wing shows

Saint 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 Vilge Fortis

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.

Revealed by recent restoration,

Bosch has given

the crucified virgin

a light beard,

still maintaining

the apparent beauty

of the young princess.

The T-shaped cross

to which Vilge Fortis is bound

has been positioned

at the centre of the painting,

where it towers

above two groups of men.

Those seemingly responsible

for her condemnation

and execution

are placed on the right.

One man points

an accusing finger

at Vilge Fortis.

A group of onlookers

seem to be horrified

and shocked

by the tragedy

of her crucifixion.

The tone of this painting

is set by the costumes

of the figures

below the saint,

who then rises up

in her bright red robe.

Pigment analysis

reveals a limited palette

consisting of usually

natural pigments

such as azurite,

lead-tin yellow,

vermilion,

carmine,

and a large amount of red,

the colour of martyrdom.

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 gigabyte

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 image

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 two donors,

yeah, the two donors

were made visible to us

and in the actual

visible light image

we can see actually

the donor shimmering

through the contours

of the figure

are still existing.

If we change the way

that we look at this,

we now bring in

an infrared image

into the mix

with which we can easily

compare what's visible

in the high resolution

visible light image

and what's underneath.

One can only speculate

why these male figures

have been painted over.

They are quite big

and significant part

of the triptych.

They were entirely painted,

so not only underdrawn,

but they were finished

as painting.

Maybe they weren't satisfied

with what Bosz painted

on the central panel.

Maybe the donors died

for whatever reason.

Maybe there was a plague

in the place

where they were from.

I mean, one can only speculate

about that.

But somewhere along the line

and fairly early on,

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 Bosz,

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 Bosz very much.

It strikes me

that the double-sided panels

that Bosz 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

in 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.

He is courting

the viewer's emotional response.

He's preparing them

with this very sweet,

innocent image,

and then he's going to hit them

with this very difficult image

on the inside of the altarpiece.

According to gospels

of Luke, Matthew, and Mark,

the Romans ordered a man

called Simon of Cyrene

to carry Christ's cross

to Golgotha,

where Christ was to be executed.

St. John, by contrast,

insists that Christ

carried it himself.

Christ is dressed

in a long, deep blue robe,

two spiked blocks,

hanging from a cord

around his waist

make it torturous

for him to walk.

He has almost reached

his destination,

as have the two criminals

who will be crucified with him.

We see the bad thief,

the one who refuses to repent,

and the good thief,

turning with folded hands

to a monk

who hears his confession.

He who shows remorse

will be forgiven his sins

before death.

Each expression is painted

very specifically on the faces.

Christ is a sort of

seraphic figure in the middle.

And what he's actually doing

is painting those same

dancing demons

that we remember

from his most famous paintings,

but they're inside the head now.

But they're there just as much.

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.

In my imagination,

I see Bosch,

someone who was very talented

and whose mind was running too fast,

so things all poured out of it.

To the outer world,

probably seemed reticent

and rather quiet.

I imagine he was seen muttering

rather a lot

as he crossed the square,

scuttled probably,

peering around with his little specks.

I imagine he was frightening to meet,

that you felt he was scrutinizing you,

looking right inside your head,

and you probably winced a little bit

when you met Bosch.

I don't suppose he was very high living.

I imagine he was rather sort of restrained

and slightly puritanical in his tastes.

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.

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 humor

and he must have enjoyed it very much,

painting all these hell scenes

and creating all these devilish monsters

and creatures.

One day, Christopher hears a child calling

and hurries to the other side of the river

to see who is there,

but no one can be seen.

The same thing happens again.

On the third occasion,

he discovers a child

sitting there

who asks Christopher

to carry him across the river.

Christopher lifts the child onto his shoulders,

takes his staff in his hand

and begins to cross the river.

As the water grows deeper,

the child grows heavier and heavier.

Christopher risks drowning

and only reaches the other side

with the greatest of difficulty.

He asks,

what has just happened?

The child replies,

don't be surprised, Christopher.

You were not only carrying

the whole world on your shoulders,

but also he who made the world,

for I am Christ,

whom you serve with this work.

Christopher is an unusual saint.

He is traditionally said

to have been a giant

who carried Christ across a river.

His Greek name literally means Christ-bearer.

A figure beside the water with his dog

is painted small,

telling us that Christopher

and the Christ-child must be enormous.

The large fish dangling from Christopher's staff

has been a common symbol of Christ and Christianity.

The miraculous nature of the scene

is represented by the hefty staff

on which Christopher supports himself,

new twigs,

with leaves have sprouted.

The world around the two central figures

seems peaceful

as the saint wades through the smooth waters.

On closer examination, however,

we also notice several ominous events.

On the far bank of the river,

a dragon looms up from a ruined castle,

while a naked man takes to his heels in fright.

A monstrous flying fish

has been painted in the lower left corner,

and beneath it a black crow

on the rigging of a broken mast

protruding from the water.

We see a hunter who has shot a bear

and is hanging it from a tree.

His crossbow lies on the ground next to him.

The bear has been hit in the heart.

The bolt sticks out of its chest

and blood drips over its fur

in a scene that appears to be brutal,

though this could represent a victory over evil.

The jug in the large tree

is a hermit's house.

A little chapel hangs from the trunk

surmounted with a cross.

There is a dung heap beneath it,

near which two hens scratch around.

A dead fox has been hung by its hind legs

on the other side of the trunk

as a further symbol, perhaps,

of the defeat

of evil.

Over the ages,

several of the paintings of Bosch

were destroyed,

and many of them have fallen apart

in panels.

For instance, the Wayfarer triptych

nowadays in four panels

that are in different museums

all over the world.

But originally they all form part

of one triptych.

The painting of the Wayfarer

was once the outside of the painting.

They were the outside of the wings.

So when they opened,

you saw the central panel.

Those two wings were taken apart,

and one of the parts was Death and the Miser,

and one of the parts of the wings

became the Allegro Gluttony

and the Ship of Fools.

We don't know what was the original name,

of the triptych,

because the central part is missing,

and normally the painting

is called after the central panel.

Here we see a boatload of merrymakers,

surrounded by drunkards and lovers.

These are people enjoying their lives,

concerned with neither God

nor his commandments.

They have given themselves over

to eating, drinking,

swimming and love-making.

And their most pressing concern

seems to be the pie

balanced on the head

of one of the swimmers.

An owl gazes down

on the carefree company

from the green branches

lashed to the top of the boat's mast.

The men and women are unaware, however,

that their sinful behaviour

is being observed,

as they devote their time

to idleness and earthly amusement.

The man holding the gigantic spoon

used to steer the vessel from the bow

seems more interested

in the game of bite the cake.

The little boat seems to be drifting

to the right, into the wind.

A reveller vomits over the bow,

while the ones in the stern are quarrelling.

The fool has turned his back

on the rest of the company

and drinks alone.

He who takes his place

on the ship of fools

sails laughing and singing to hell.

Many people said,

well, Bosch is a pessimist,

but I think that he is an optimist

with a good sense of humour.

I think it's not possible

to paint a ship of fools

when you are without

any sense of that humour.

But also a very...

believing Christian

who was thinking about...

a lot about the evil in the world

and who was giving his contemporaries

a message.

A man sits up in bed

looking into the eyes of death,

who appears from behind the door.

It is time.

The final hour has come.

The question now is whether

the dying man will grasp the bag

held out to him by a demon

beneath the curtain of the bed.

Actions will determine the man's fate.

Is it to be heaven or hell?

An angel tries to draw his attention

to the image of a crucifix

that appears in the window.

The rays of light that enter the room

via the crucified Christ

have not reached as far as the dying man.

There is a tension

between the angel and the devil,

who has positioned himself

on the canopy of the bed,

in the hope that the man

will make the wrong choice.

Will it be heaven or hell?

The power in the paintings of Bos

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 painting,

thinking about the subject.

Bos 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 Bos wants.

Blessed are those who live as pilgrims

in this wicked world,

and remain untainted by it.

For the pilgrim travels

the king's highway,

neither on the right or the left.

If he should come upon a place

where there is fighting and quarreling,

he will not become involved.

And if he should come to a place

where there is dancing and leaping,

or where there is a celebration,

these will not entice him,

for he knows he is a stranger.

And as such has no interest in these things.

The traveller looks over his right shoulder

and sees the gnawed remains of a horse.

Everything becomes personal

when we face death.

This is the case not only for the traveller,

but also for the beholder of the painting,

who must not stray

from the narrow path of virtue.

Opening the triptych continues

this moral story

about the course of human life.

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.

When you go to the central panel,

you see a lot of people who are struggling

to have a part of that hay

that is stuck on that wagon.

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 hay wagon,

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 moralistic metaphors.

It's not 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's 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, in 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.

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 altarpiece,

which would have been saints.

One begins with the left-hand side panel

and 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 Adam.

You have man, you have all kinds of ominous 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.

Bosch very cleverly links the left panel to the central panel

by having a continuous landscape that connects the two.

What Bosch creates is a panoramic view

and in a way it is as though we're looking from above.

First sort of lower tier, where there's groups of figures

doing a variety of things,

either eating fruit, taking shelter in plants or animals,

or there's a figure inside a mussel shell, for example.

Beautiful, transparent globe,

on the interior and with figures inside of it.

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 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.

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 that he would spend more time painting the figures,

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

What one might expect to find, one does not find.

One finds basically the opposite of that.

And I think that's something that viewers in Bosch's own time

would have been fascinated by.

Why has this world gone upside down?

What is Bosch trying to tell us?

Bosch is doing exactly in the painting

what man would have been struggling with

and 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.

And in the central panel, we have that sin of lust being sort of packed apart

and put in visual form in a number of different ways.

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,

is 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 a very loud, in a way,

and it evokes a lot of sound.

This is Bosch's most interesting hell panel.

There are other panels of hell that he paints,

but this is his most interesting.

He creates beautiful but also scary compositions of figures.

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 a palace of a nobleman,

that would be possible.

I think that's the curious way that we regard Bosch.

Bosch has been 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 notions.

It's a sort of backwards-forwards movement

that everybody in the art historical world games constantly being played.

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

without fear, fearless painting,

it's a David and Goliath situation,

obviously with Bosch being David.

You'd probably find that Bosch left very little out of human experience

and indeed either the natural world and also the man-made world.

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've 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?

You know, 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, you know, 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 who,

he's someone that people keep coming back to

and they keep getting something from his paintings.