EXCERPTED FROM HIERONYMUS BOSCH & THE OTHER RENAISSANCE (ABRAMS, 2024). BY BERNARD AIKEMA AND FERNANDO CHECA CREMADES

Few indeed are the artists who, over the course of the years, have enjoyed the levels of fame, admiration, allure, but also astonishment that were prompted by the work of the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. Who was he? What do we know about him and his artistic production? But most of all: why this incredible notoriety for a painter who lived more than five centuries ago on the outskirts of the Habsburg Empire?

Let us start out by saying immediately that we have only the most fragmentary information about the life and world of Hieronymus Bosch: we have no idea who taught him, his paintings are undated, and we do not know the names of most of his clients. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that he worked (nearly) all his life (ca. 1450–1516) in the prosperous provincial city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, one of the capitals of the Duchy of Brabant (Netherlands). His clients were, apparently, the wealthy burghers, churches, and religious institutions of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and surrounding areas, among them the important church of Sint Jan (St. John), and the prominent Confraternity of Our Lady, but also a few highly placed members of the court, such as Engelbert of Nassau, Mencía de Mendoza, Hippolyte de Berthoz, and even the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Fair. With such an array of clients, Bosch had become a prominent individual in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and his reputation extended well beyond the walls of his hometown. At some point, he decided to change his name from Jheronimus van Aken (a surname meaning “from Aachen,” his family’s original home), to Jheronimus (Hieronymus) Bosch, after the name of his birthplace (‘s-Hertogenbosch, of course). That was the name he used in his signatures on the paintings that eventually made him world-famous. His physical appearance seems to have been left to posterity in a drawing that we can date from the mid-sixteenth century, now held in Arras; that drawing was freely reproduced in an engraving published by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp in 1572. In the Arras drawing, the painter portrays himself as a middle-aged man, his face gaunt and worn, his eyes apparently evocative of a particular intelligence and sensitivity.

There is no question that Hieronymus Bosch maintained an atelier with a certain number of assistants; the varying level of quality of the artworks that bear his signature offers clear evidence of that fact. We lack, however, the documentation that might allow us to explore the matter more in depth. In any case, a pictorial corpus is ascribed to the Bosch “firm”—variegated in terms of subjects and quality of execution—that includes some forty or so artworks; they are currently scattered throughout various public collections in the Western world, especially in Madrid and Venice (the two cities that house the greatest number of Bosch paintings), as well as Bruges, Ghent, Vienna, Berlin, London, Lisbon, Rotterdam, and Paris, to list the principal cities holding his paintings.

All in all, a very respectable artistic production; all the same, it would not have enjoyed any particular attention beyond the limited circle of specialists had it not been for a fairly narrow core of artworks featuring a variety of subjects, characterized by absolutely extraordinary presentations, virtually unparalleled in the time period. These are fantastic and dreamlike evocations: landscape views with uncanny and hallucinatory aspects, inhabited by a variegated and disproportionate population, along with animals, monsters, and other spectral and grotesque figures, frequently set in nocturnal scenes, illuminated by frightful blazes in the distance: dark and horrifying visions, but also enchanting and surreal delights. The most famous of these astonishing paintings include The Temptation of St. Anthony in Lisbon, the two triptychs of St. Liberata and The Hermit Saints and four small panel paintings with Visions of the Hereafter in Venice, The Last Judgment in Vienna, The Last Judgment in Bruges, The Temptation of St. Anthony and The Haywain in Madrid, and also in Madrid, Bosch’s absolute masterpiece: the large triptych usually titled The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Temptations of St. Anthony, detail (c. 1500). Palácio das Necessidades, Lisbon

The exceptional nature of those artworks was quickly singled out both by critics and the viewing public: as early as the first decades of the sixteenth century, the name Bosch—Bosc, Bosco, Bosque, Boschi, Basi, and Boshc (sic!)—was widely associated with this sort of extraordinary and curious image. For instance, the Flem- ish chroniqueur Marcus van Vaernewyck described Bosch around 1566 as a “devilmaker” (duvelmakere), while just a year later (1567), the Florentine writer Lodovico Guicciardini residing in Antwerp described the painter as “the most noble and admirable inventor of things fantastical and bizarre.” Along the same lines, Dominicus Lampsonius, a humanist and collector from Liège, in his book Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies (1572), referred to Boschian visions of “ghosts” and “specters of Erebus,” while, a few decades later on, the Dutch historian Karel van Mander (1604) called Bosch a painter of “spirits and monsters from Hell” (ghespoock en ghedrochten der Hellen).

These are Flemish and Dutch voices, but Hieronymus Bosch’s renown as a painter of monsters and other such fantasies was hardly limited to the Flemish and Dutch world. More so, the characterization of Hieronymus Bosch as an essentially “fantastical” artist seems to have been put forth first and foremost by Mediterranean (Italian and Spanish) authors, and only secondarily, and subsequently, by critics north of the Alps: this is an essential and unquestioned fact as well as a crucial starting point for our observations here. Already in the years 1517–1518, Antonio de Beatis described The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych as an artwork “of varied bizarreries” with “things so delightful and fantastic that there is no way to describe them adequately to those who have no knowledge of them.” Another fundamental account can be found in the manuscript titled Notizia d’opere di disegno by the Venetian patrician Marcantonio Michiel, who identified, in 1521, in the collection of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, three paintings by Bosch depicting scenes with demonic imps and hellish and dreamlike visions. Here for the first time we see the introduction of the three thematic categories that would redound over the centuries to the fame of the painter of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, right down to the present day: monsters, hell, and dreams. Here we need only mention a few of the most pertinent judgments in this connection leaving any detailed analysis of Bosch’s popularity in the various Spanish and Italian sources of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to later chapters. Vasari (1568) speaks of “a sheet of S. Martin, with a barque full of Devils in the most bizarre forms,” while the Milanese critic Gian Paolo Lomazzo, in 1584, mentions “Girolamo Boschi fiamengo, who in the representation of apparitions and extraordinary and horrible dreams was unique and truly divine.” In Spanish critical literature, Bosch as a phenomenon was particularly appreciated. Felipe de Guevara, in 1560, attributed to “Boshc” not only the role of “inuentor de monstruos y chimeras,” but also stated that Bosch had relaunched the themes of the ancient painter Gryllus, mentioned by Pliny as a creator of comic scenes. José de Sigüenza, librarian of the Escorial, introduced another aspect, comparing Bosch’s “disparates” (pranks) to macaronic literature, an irreverent and whimsical genre practiced by the Brescian author Merlin Cocai (Teofilo Folengo), thus offering other possible interpretations. All these aspects will be dealt with at greater length throughout this book.

In short, Hieronymus Bosch’s artistic identity appeared to have obtained its definitive form over the course of the sixteenth century: up until today, his name is indeed considered synonymous with monsters, devils, and hellish and dreamlike scenes. Actually, the corpus of Bosch’s paintings is not limited to depictions of such fanciful visions: it should be noted that even in the background of his paintings of more apparently conventional subjects (saints, Bible stories) there frequently appear hybrid, bizarre creatures, or else violent little scenes, straight out of a nightmare. These are microscopic figurines that require close-up vision and scrutiny. To be mentioned are examples like the particularly beautiful Adoration of the Magi in Madrid, the St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, likewise in Madrid, the St. John the Evangelist on Patmos in Berlin, as well as the St. Christopher Carrying the Christ Child and the Wayfarer, both in Rotterdam.

The Adoration of the Magi (1609 and 1628-29) by Peter Paul Rubens. Museo del Prado, Madrid

Ever since the turn of the twentieth century, art historians have wondered about the meaning of Bosch’s extravagant paintings. Erwin Panofsky, in his classic volume about fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting, renounced even the attempt to understand Bosch’s world and sighed, paraphrasing Marsilio Ficino: “This, too high for my wit / I prefer to omit”; others however felt up to the challenge. Basically, there are two lines of inquiry, to which in more recent years a number of new and fascinating ideas have been added. The first attempts to prove that key works of Bosch—The Haywain, The Garden of Earthly Delights—were visualizations of a single underlying idea, which would eventually be developed in all the varied details of the depiction. The most widely cited—and criticized—proponent of this approach was the German art historian Wilhelm Fraenger, who claimed to glimpse in Bosch’s artworks an expression of a secret sect, the Adamites, hypothetically headquartered in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Others see Bosch as an alchemist, an initiate into various esoteric practices, a drug addict (sic!) or—inevitably—a heretic. The scholars who follow the second line of thought, in contrast, consider it essential to patiently decipher the endless details of Bosch’s paintings in iconographic terms, attempting to explain them through parallels and convergences with the vast and variegated world of visual motifs engendered by the folk culture of the late Middle Ages. That approach was practiced by a number of Belgian art historians around the middle of the twentieth century (the so-called School of Ghent) and later perfected by the Dutch scholar Dirk Bax in a series of erudite and thoroughgoing publications. From there, a later generation of researchers attempted to fit the Boschian visual language into a very specific social, economic, and ideological context; among these specialists, the name of Paul Vandenbroeck stands out. At first inspired by the innovative research of his teacher Jan Karel Steppe, Vandenbroeck insisted that Hieronymus Bosch’s visual world was substantially moralistic in nature and directed at Flemish urban elites. In the same methodological vein, Eric de Bruijn established himself as another active scholar of the Belgian school. The Dutch scholars Matthijs Ilsink and Reindert Falkenburg, in contrast, took different approaches: Ilsink focused on the “distant” dialectical relationship between Bosch and his leading follower in the Netherlands, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, while Falkenburg subjected The Garden of Earthly Delights to an in depth analysis in iconological and semantic terms within the context of the culture of the Burgundian court. A somewhat similar methodology was adopted by Hans Belting, whose study of that same painting, nevertheless, led him to very different conclusions. Joseph Koerner, for his part, went back to analyzing the two artists, Bosch and Bruegel, from various points of view.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail

In the meantime attempts were made to redefine the corpus of the artist according to new criteria and to establish a certain chronological order. Following the classic monographs by Charles de Tolnay and Roger Henri Marijnissen, and the more recent one by Stefan Fischer, the team of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, under the leadership of Jos Koldeweij, published a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s painted and graphic production, based upon a multiyear, multidisciplinary project, giving ample space to technical aspects and considerations of conservation.

The catalog of drawings was curated by Fritz Koreny, who made clear, among other things, that Hieronymus Bosch was the first Netherlandish artist of whom we have a truly proper nucleus—a corpus—of autograph drawings of various techniques and functions; these drawings, by and large of excellent graphic quality, display an astonishing free range of imaginative ideas. The results of these various research projects have been presented to the public in two major monographic shows organized on the occasion of the quincentennial of the painter’s death, respectively in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Madrid (2016). Three other exhibitions put on for the quincentennial, less well publicized but particularly revealing, illustrated the spread of Bosch’s visual inventions through reproduction in print. Those shows, organized and held respectively in Hamburg, Dresden, and, in the United States, St. Louis, Missouri, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, were all three accompanied by excellent scholarly catalogs. In synthesis, this is the state of the art on Hieronymus Bosch. These studies offer a wealth of bibliographic material and a lively debate still unfolding, at times highly impassioned and opinionated, concerning the various issues of meaning and the definition of the corpus. All the same, there are other problems, perhaps less commonly discussed, which still remain open. In this book, we are focusing on certain questions— two in particular—that we consider to be of great importance inasmuch as they point to broader issues. The first and, perhaps, the more crucial concerns the spectacular popularity of Bosch’s work to the south of the Alps, in Spain, in Italy, in Habsburg territories, and—to a lesser extent—in France. Spectacular and early: as we have already indicated, it was first and foremost in Mediterranean countries that Hieronymus Bosch became known as a painter of monsters, fires, and dreams, in keeping with a “profile” that would only later be adopted by Flemish and Netherlandish writers.

That popularity is reflected not only in literary and critical texts, but also and above all in the purchases of Boschian paintings by the leading art collectors in Spain and Northern Italy. Among them, particularly noteworthy are the Grimani family of Venice, Mencía de Mendoza y Fonseca, the Guevara family, King Philip II, and the Duke of Alba on the Iberian peninsula; still, those illustrious personages were hardly the only Bosch aficionados. Among the art collectors interested in the paintings by Bosch we should note such great Italian princely families as the Gonzaga and the Farnese, such Habsburg scions as Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy, and high functionaries connected with them, such as Count Henry III of Nassau. The last named individuals did not live in Southern Europe, but in the Netherlands, confirming clearly that the taste for the Boschian imaginary world was in some way bound up with the Habsburg dynasty, and was hardly limited to the Mediterranean territories or the local patrons of Brabant and Flanders.

That impression is reinforced by the fact that the direct rival to the Habsburgs on the European political stage, King Francis I Valois of France, was likewise fascinated with Bosch, and in fact placed an order for an important cycle of tapestries based upon the visual inventions of the master of ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

We’ll discuss all this at greater length below, but there’s more. In Italy as well as in Spain, the allure of this Boschian visual language—which was popularized not only and not exclusively through the master’s own works, but also and especially through copies, derivative works, pastiches of his paintings, prints of various kinds, even some sculpture—was grafted onto a variegated visual and intellectual culture that was open-minded, characterized by a powerful curiosity toward all that was new, unexpected, and even exotic. That culture manifested itself in manifold forms, differentiating itself from the mainstream classicizing mode along the lines of Alberti and Vasari, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian; at times it presented itself in a polemic fashion, but always attesting to the heterogeneity and expressive varietas that was so characteristic of the period. In this context, the Boschian universe played a role that was anything but secondary—indeed, in some ways it acted as a catalyst—in forming the various manifestations of an alternative Renaissance. It comes as no surprise that various scholars should have speculated as to the possibility that Bosch himself actually traveled to Italy, perhaps even to Venice. According to those specialists, Bosch’s hypothetical Italian journey would have taken place in the period between 1498 and 1504: years during which, in fact, we have no documentation of Bosch’s presence in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. If we look more closely, however, the arguments for that trip are rather unpersuasive. Cardinal Grimani, in all likelihood, purchased his Bosch paintings through the good offices of a Flemish merchant who lived in Venice (we’ll discuss that episode in the third section of this volume), while the infrequent traces of classical and/or Italian motifs in Bosch’s paintings can be easily explained through the influence of prints, drawn copies, statuettes, and so on. The painter’s absence from the city of his birth during the years in question most likely was connected to his work on The Garden of Earthly Delights; the execution of that triptych—as we can well imagine—demanded an extended stay in Brussels, in the home of the (likely) patron, Henry III of Nassau.

Hieronymus Bosch, then, as the protagonist and catalyst of a “different” Renaissance: that statement demands that we rethink our ideas about the artistic and cultural geography of the period.

As a counter-model to the Italo-centric—or perhaps more precise a Tuscan-centric—one that has been postulated ever since the sixteenth century and broadly followed up to the present day, we propose a different configuration, less schematic and more dynamic: a configuration that underscores the role of the major European power and market centers and the new artistic mobility that in the sixteenth century characterized the larger culture in general and artistic culture in particular. Instead of the conventional schematic structure that “monopolizes” the centrifugal diffusion of classicism from the Italian peninsula to the rest of Europe, we begin to see a different, more heterogeneous—as well as more complex—system of artistic geography. Centers and peripheries are flexible concepts subject to a varied array of dynamics: it is against that background that the taste develops for such alternative forms and typologies as irregularity, aberration, exoticism, and dreams. In other words: the artistic language of Hieronymus Bosch and his “brand,” which, in fact, is the central theme of our book.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH, THE “ANTI-RENAISSANCE,” AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

Bernard Aikema

The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail

To the reading public at large, but also to many specialists, the Renaissance (with a capital R) refers to the momentous discovery of the individual, spurred by a larger revival of ancient classical culture. The concept was first formulated in 1860 by the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in his seminal volume, titled Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy). Burckhardt claimed that the Renaissance originated in the fifteenth century in Italy, and specifically in Florence, manifesting itself in all walks of culture. From Florence, he wrote, the new civilization “all’antica” later spread throughout Europe, ultimately triumphing in even the farthest flung and most peripheral regions of the continent.

At the core of this view are the spectacular innovations expressed in the visual arts, in the work and theory of such figures as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Michelangelo, and a plethora of other immensely talented individuals, largely from Central Italy. These figures served as unexampled models for the future artistic development of Europe (and elsewhere). This is the way in which the triumphant saga of Tuscan-Roman art was described by Giorgio Vasari, an Arezzo-born painter and historian in the service of the Medici, in his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), first published in 1550 and subsequently revised in an expanded second edition in 1568.

Underpinning Vasari’s aesthetic system was an ideological concept that defined the classical manner as the supreme form of representation proper to princely power. As such, classicism expressed itself in various forms in Italian courts from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century: in Rome, of course, but even earlier in Mantua and, naturally, Florence. It is no coincidence that Gonzaga-ruled Mantua and Medici-controlled Florence were longtime, trusted allies of the Habsburgs, Europe’s most powerful dynasty. Charles V, head of the Holy Roman Empire since 1519, considered Italy to be the foundation of his overarching plan to establish a universal empire under his supreme leadership. It should come as no surprise that, according to that plan, the classical style proved to be an indispensable visual instrument. Consequently, the artistic language of Raphael, Bramante, Sansovino, and their fellow artists served as a model throughout Northern and Central Europe. Whereas over the course of the sixteenth century, such northern Italian artists as Titian, Leone Leoni, and others were recruited to give form and image to the imperial idea in the Habsburg capitals; numerous painters, sculptors, and architects from Northern Europe—among them Antonio Moro, Michiel Coxcie, Nicolaes Jonghelinck, etc.—followed in their footsteps.

All very true, but the larger picture is actually more variegated: Habsburg magnificentia also manifested itself in other forms, as the following chapter will explain. What we want to reconsider in these pages is both the validity and the limitations of the “Vasarian model” in Italy (and, to a lesser extent, in Spain, Portugal, and France) as an essential postulate for defining and understanding the remarkable popularity and influence of Hieronymus Bosch and a bevy of other clearly “nonclassical” artists and works in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world.

For quite a while now, it has been clear to art historians that the concept of the “Renaissance” need not be confined to the revival of antiquity in the Tuscan-Roman manner. It has moreover become evident that the idea of the exaltation of the individual is debatable at best. While it is no doubt correct to state that the pristine form of the ancient style, in its various monumental manifestations, had become a privileged expression of power for the rulers of the Italian Peninsula, it should also be noted that the classical manner was by no means the only mode practiced in the various regions of Italy. Actually, it was the very diversity of artistic forms and expressions that constituted the chief characteristic of the visual culture of the Mediterranean (and Europe in general) in the sixteenth century, rather than any overall mimesis of the classical, so fervently praised by Vasari to the exclusion of almost all else. Even this statement, however, demands clarification. First, we should explain what we mean by antiquity and the “all’antica style.” According to the aesthetics of the period, the revival of the ancient went hand in hand with the idea of imitating nature: a combination that led to a great diversity of expressive forms, with many local and regional variations that were only partially noted by Vasari. He largely overlooks the renewed school of painting in the Marche, for instance, or the art of Southern Italy. Even the regions of Northern and Central Italy, however, offered a far more diverse artistic panorama, and one that was certainly not limited to the sole classically influenced model that was to some extent inspired by Tuscan innovations.

To place in context this diversity, which manifested itself in every artistic sector and not just in painting, the Italian art historian Eugenio Battisti introduced the concept of antirina- scimento (Anti-Renaissance) in a 1962 book. This volume, largely unnoticed at first, eventually went into two more expanded editions (1989 and 2005) and acquired virtually the cult status of a manifesto. This posthumous renown (Battisti died in 1989) was undoubtedly bound up with the more general renewed appreciation in the late twentieth century of the ideas of Aby Warburg, an advocate of a more experimental and interdisciplinary (as the term might have been a few decades ago) form of art history. Warburg’s work was one of Battisti’s main sources of inspiration. According to Battisti, the proliferation of artistic forms and expressions in the sixteenth century should be viewed in relatively explicit opposition to the dominant theme of classicism. This view, of course, is far too schematic: not all manifestations “alternative” to the ancient style are antithetical to the classical. On the contrary, the fascination, lasting actuality, and relevance of Battisti’s book to our central topic lie in its opening up to vast sectors of visual culture, such as the depiction of fairy tales, witchcraft, various forms of magic, the emerging trend of “microcosmic” collections, the nascent field of comic art, as well as subjects taken from everyday life. The book also incorporates scientific illustration and the progressive mapping of the world then underway. Generally overlooked in mainstream art historical studies, those themes were presented in Battisti’s book in a broad artistic spectrum ranging between high and low art, between popular culture and elite civilization, between centers and peripheries. And all this was accompanied by a flourish of perspectives in terms of space and time and buttressed by wide-ranging erudition, positing a multitude of interrelations among the various visual, literary, and even theatrical and musical artistic forms.

Such a diversity of subjects and artistic categories responds to the demands of an audience that, during the sixteenth century, became broader and more populous, as well as increasingly heterogeneous in sociocultural terms; an audience that developed more varied and refined artistic tastes, especially in certain sectors. Among these new themes, fantastic, bizarre, and even monstrous scenes and figures stand out, in sharp variance with the classical approach of Leon Battista Alberti or the more general concept of the imitation of nature. These subjects flourished in various forms and techniques, in painting, printing, sculpture, and other minor arts. Still, we are prompted to wonder, should they be considered manifestations of the “Anti-Renaissance”? First of all, we should clearly state that these subjects are by no means “new” in the strict sense of the word; in the medieval imagination, monsters like the basilisk or the Panotti were regularly relegated to the far ends of the earth, where they would have populated a mundus inversus, an upside-down world. Aby Warburg believed that these prodigies were largely based on the semblances of ancient gods, but further transformed beyond recognition. “Per monstra ad astra” (“through monsters to the stars”); and so, in the Renaissance, ancient mythological deities were thought to have returned to their “original” classical form. It is a fascinating idea, and it offers a variety of outlooks, but it needs to be reconsidered and diversified. The opening up of the Western world to other continents at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a result of voyages of exploration, trade, scientific discovery, and artistic pursuit, among others, as well as the generally emerging culture of curiositas, revealed new “wonders” to the European populace. These marvels, or mirabilia, were eagerly gathered, studied, and collected. It is, however, generally accepted that Renaissance teratology (in the sense of the study of fantastic creatures and monsters) presents itself quite differently from medieval teratology. Alongside the stereotyped lineages of Blemmyes or headless men, Panotti, acephals, basilisks, and others , there now emerged individual monsters, unique, with curious, fantastic, deformed appearances “contrary to nature.” Around the same time, the discoveries of profoundly “different” populations in the Americas and Asia demanded a confrontation with conventional medieval schemas of “monstrous beings,” sparking an array of varied and often contradictory reflections on the diversity of the human race. As evidence of this interest, we cite a decidedly Boschian painting from around 1510–1520, likely of Portuguese origin (Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, or National Museum of Ancient Art), depicting a particularly theatrical scene of hell, including certain Indian and African elements (feathers, a horn, etc.). The prevailing reaction among the general public was curiosity, but also amusement at the sheer fun (lusus) that these phenomena stirred. This sensibility toward “the other” perfectly lined up with the popular concept of imagination, or fantasia explored in Aristotle’s Poetics, which held that artistic creativity is preferable to the mechanical imitation of nature (we shall return to this idea at this chapter’s end). We find an echo of that debate in bronze figurines depicting various kinds of animals and impish monsters, many made from molds, displaying painstaking and naturalistic detail, and produced in various places across Europe between the end of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth century, especially in towns of the Po Valley, among them Venice, Padua, and surrounding areas. The bronzes of Andrea Riccio and fellow artists—highly admired in Padua’s scientific and humanistic circles—can be linked in various ways to venerable old concepts and prototypes but should also be considered in connection with the images of naturalistic subjects being produced in Europe’s major urban centers from the second half of the fifteenth century onward. That trend produced numerous miniature masterpieces by Albrecht Dürer, Giorgio Liberale (Liberale da Udine), Jacopo Ligozzi, Joris Hoefnagel, and many others. In their virtuoso imitative efforts, these depictions meant to measure up to the aesthetic standards of classical antiquity, which valued the “photographic” rendering of nature, as set forth in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Natural History). It would therefore be wrong to consider these works “anticlassical” or “Anti-Renaissance.” We should also make clear that there was no contradiction between the principles of classicism and even the wildly fanciful combinations of detailed realism and extravagant and bizarre visions found in the work of a master such as Albrecht Dürer (for instance, his engraving of The Sea Monster (Das Meereswunde) The same is true of Hieronymus Bosch’s inventions, to which we should now turn our attention.

Marcantonio Michiel (1521) claimed that two of the three Bosch paintings in Domenico Grimani’s Venetian collection depicted, respectively, “hell,” “monsters,” and “dreams.” These are themes that fit into the category of the fantastic and line up, not coincidentally, with the taste of such erudite Paduan collectors of bronzes as the philosopher Nicholas Leonicus Thomaeus (Niccolò Leonico Tomeo) and the humanist Pomponius Gauricus (Pomponio Gaurico). It is therefore reasonable to assume that the learned Venetian Cardinal Grimani acquired Bosch’s works as examples of a fashionable artistic trend, in some sense attributable to the fad for antiquities. Michiel’s specific reference to the dream is worth stressing. That reference is tied to the growing interest in ancient writings on the topic, such as Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, with commentary by Macrobius, or Artemidorus’s treatise on interpreting dreams, Oneirocritica, published by Aldus Manutius in 1518. The debate as to the nature of dreams—whether to consider them prophetic or deceptive, or something else entirely—will be further elucidated in the chapter “Daydreaming with Bosch” by Ralph Dekoninck and David Zagoury. The influence of the theme of dreams on contemporary artistic production is unmistakable in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , the renowned illustrated tale featuring woodcuts of a dream inspired by Dante, published in Venice by Manutius in 1499, as well as Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving titled The Dream (circa 1509). This engraving depicts two nude women sleeping outdoors with a fire in the background and several impish monsters in the foreground. The scene likely reproduces a Venetian pictorial invention, which reiterates in an almost programmatic fashion the various trends thus far set forth. We shall return to this point.

Bosch and classical antiquity, then? For Spanish authors Ambrosio de Morales, Felipe de Guevara, and Fray José de Sigüenza, who all gravitated around the Escorial and the court of Philip II, there could be no doubt. They were certain that Bosch should be considered in a classicistic context (Fernando Checa Cremades discusses this idea further in this same volume). To the modern viewer, however, Bosch’s “kaleidoscopic” works appear to be diametrically opposed to the well-ordered compositions of Bosch’s leading Florentine and Venetian contemporaries. Whereas works of the Italian Renaissance feature schemes based on proportional and mathematical models and tend to limit the number of protagonists depicted, employing a carefully measured subdivision between main and secondary figures, marked by a rhythmic “vacuum” that was considered essential to any articulation of the depicted storia, Bosch’s paintings present themselves with no apparent compositio. With an abundance of details and a proliferation of human, animal, and other creatures, Bosch’s works portray scenes in an “additive” manner, the clear opposite of the “syntactic” system so dear to Leon Battista Alberti, the author of De pictura. To Alberti, Bosch’s paintings—if he had lived to be able to see them—would have seemed like clear examples of the dissolutus style that he so sharply criticized in the work of an Italian painter of his time like Pisanello, a highly successful artist of the first half of the fifteenth century. Certain of Pisanello’s paintings resemble vast tapestries, such as the Mantuan frescoes with Arthurian scenes (circa 1447–48). Likewise, some of Bosch’s paintings also resemble tapestries, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Haywain ; indeed, these depictions were perfectly suited to be woven into wall hangings, as we will later see. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tapestries (we should not forget) were the most appreciated and expensive category of art; European princes vied to boast the most splendiferous tapestries.

In the earliest years of the sixteenth century, the leading rulers of Europe, among them Philip the Fair of Burgundy, emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, Francis I of France, and England’s Henry VIII acquired a varied array of tapestry cycles featuring exotic and foreign themes, due to Portuguese overseas discoveries and conquests. One fascinating tapestry, now in the collection of the Lisbon Museu de Artes Decorativas (Museum of Decorative Arts), and unfortunately cut along the edges, depicting a triumphal procession with five giraffes, an elephant, and many other picturesque figures, was most likely produced for King Manuel I of Portugal as part of a series titled “À la manière de Portugal et de Indie,” and can be dated to roughly 1500–1505. This tapestry is evocative of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in more than one way, offering some useful observations and hypotheses. The giraffe is a motif that links Bosch’s masterpiece to the world outside of Europe: here, Bosch borrowed the giraffe motif from a drawing by the Italian traveler Cyriacus of Ancona, now held in Florence’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Laurentian Medici Library) and copied more than once. For instance, we find it in Sigismondo Tizio’s late fifteenth-century Historiae Senenses. Speaking generally, this reinforces the idea that The Garden of Earthly Delights was an expression of a high- level tradition of courtly art, with all the ideological, educational, and social implications that go along with it. It gives rise to the presumption, though, that Bosch’s four monumental tapestries (initially produced for Francis I of Valois and later revisited for the highest-ranking Habsburg officials) actually fit into a tradition of tapestry cycles featuring triumphant, exotic, and fantastic themes, first introduced around 1500 within Central and Southern Europe’s most ambitious and powerful ruling houses.

No need to devote any more space to these suppositions here. Let us turn our attention instead to the original meaning of the variegated visions that Bosch painted. A great many words have been written on this topic, as mentioned in the preceding chapter. This debate, however, concerns us only tangentially because the relative majority of Bosch’s works were originally meant for clients north of the Alps, and only found their way into Spanish or Italian collections later on. It’s hard to imagine that certain specific semantic and iconographic expressions relating to the social, cultural, and religious worlds of Brabant and Flanders would be comprehensible as such to a strictly Mediterranean audience. To a Spanish and Italian public, the fascination with Bosch was of a completely different order. Bosch also had numerous admirers at the Habsburg court and related social circles. The Garden of Earthly Delights was probably painted around 1500 for Count Engelbert II of Nassau, a prominent courtier living in Brussels at the time. According to Reindert Falkenburg’s line of thought, this extraordinary triptych would be a kind of speculum, or mirror, an “open” visual text, to some extent poly-interpretable, meant to be seen and discussed by the chosen company of friends and acquaintances of this patron of the arts; also, it may have carried an educational purpose specifically for Engelbert’s nephew and protégé, Henry of Nassau. This hypothesis, supported by a series of specific clues not to be discussed here, appears important for more than one reason.

Let us state, first of all, that for an Italian audience with a certain educational background, familiar with the culture of the “whimsical and bizarre” engendered by imagination and fantasy summed up in the paragraphs above, the infinite array of peculiar, enigmatic, and curious details in Bosch’s work—such as impish monsters, extravagant pseudo-architectural edifices, fantastical landscapes, and more—would have provided a source of undeniable fascination, amusement, and curiosity. But for Cardinal Grimani, the three paintings by Bosch likely held an additional dimension of interest. True Renaissance prince that he was, the powerful Venetian prelate kept a large and varied collection, including a “studio di anticaglia,” or study filled with antiquities, as well as tapestries, Flemish and Italian paintings, and many other objects; furthermore, Grimani, a particularly learned and well-read person, owned a magnificent library. It seems plausible that his extensive collection possessed the character of a “universal” presentation of the wonders of nature and human knowledge: in short, a “microcosmic” collection, in keeping with the model of the Wunderkammern being set up across the continent at that time, especially in Northern European countries.

These collections featured a vast assortment of objects, both natural and manmade (naturalia and artificialia), of every conceivable type and size and as such they are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s “overcrowded” paintings. Like a Wunderkammer, Bosch’s artworks lend themselves to careful and sustained scrutiny. Even more so, they impose this on any viewer, transmitting variegated visual information, not always clear, frequently enigmatic, at times contradictory, but always fascinating and even entertaining. This jumbled variety prompts discussion, exchanges of impressions, conversation before the image, exactly as Wunder- kammern were the topic of debate in courtly environments. An excellent example of this type of cultured dialogue is reported by the physician Johann Neefe, who recalls Emperor Ferdinand I’s Viennese Tischgespräche (table talks), wide-ranging discussions of matters related to objects in his Kunstkammer during meals.

Viewed in this context, the works by Bosch owned by Cardinal Grimani fit neatly into a sociocultural context of court culture, characterized by frequent exchanges of opinions and sociable discourse, as attested by a rich and varied literature of dialogues, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier and Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani being perhaps the best known instances. The culture of debate had a long-standing tradition as a method of humanistic education, but by the end of the fifteenth century, it gradually morphed into an instrument of communication and civil comportment for the upper classes. The aim of these discussions was not necessarily to arrive at a single, definitive solution to a given problem, but rather to trade ingenious argumentation and reasoning expressed in elegant, brilliant, perhaps unexpected and idiosyncratic phrasing; Bosch’s paintings were uniquely appealing to this type of discours. As the Riminese humanist Joannes Aurelius Augurellus (Giovanni Aurelio Augurelli) wrote in a poem dedicated to the Venetian patrician Bernardo Bembo (1475), concerning the significance of the standard, or pennant, presented by Giuliano de’ Medici at a Florentine joust: “Many express varied opinions, none agree, but all this is more beautiful than these painted images themselves.”

But let’s return to the conceptual pairing of Renaissance/ Anti-Renaissance, or to be more precise, classicism/anticlassicism. This problematic pairing depends on how we define the terms “classic” and “classicism”; a notion whose meaning can be variable, oscillating between the view of measured and ideal Winckelmannian proportion, on the one hand, and the rediscovered artistic expression so dear to Aby Warburg. Be it as it may, we have already seen that, while imitation of a model was the norm, the model in question need not always necessarily taken from antiquity; indeed, in certain cases, the canonical value of the “pristine form” was openly defied or scoffed at, if not ridiculed. One extreme case concerns Rosso Fiorentino, who, according to a recent interpretation, supposedly undertook a “reverse” imitation of Michelangelo’s canonical example, transforming his own heroic figures into bodies subject to decomposition, sexual passions, and violence. North of the Alps, parodies of the “ancient” model occasionally took the form of outright mockery, as in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Peasant Couple Dancing (1514), which presents itself as a kind of antipode to the “high” model of the Laocoön sculptural group. Dürer’s classicizing inventions, remarkably, were parodied in their turn by his student and rival, Hans Baldung Grien. More instances of such provocative transformations both north and south of the Alps could be mentioned.

Those instances highlight a true “anticlassicism,” presented in a decidedly polemical manner. On the other hand, the boundless variations on the classical model offered by the bizarre, the irregular, and the curious present themselves as products of imagination, fitting into the broad spectrum lying between the imitation of nature and more or less free invention. The fascinating evocations of the “primitive” life of the first humans on earth— in Lucretian terms—by the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) offer an excellent example.

Another instructive case concerns the so-called “grotesques,” prompted by the immense variety of examples offered by the classical figurative legacy. Extremely popular throughout Europe, these decorative forms consisted of candelabra, festoons, masks, and more. They were sharply criticized by none other than Vitruvius himself because they were fantastical, with no correspondence to reality. In his treatise titled Disegno (1549), Anton Francesco Doni stated that such figures emerged from the “chaos of my brain.” While generally subscribing to Vitruvius’s unflattering judgment, Doni nevertheless reveals some appreciation for these “painted chimeras.” Vasari himself expresses some reservations but is not entirely negative about this “kind of licentious and ridiculous painting.” Later in that same century, Lomazzo echoes him, stating “in the inventions of grotesques, more than in any other, there runs a degree of furor and natural eccentricity”; quoting the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro, the Milanese author describes them as the “dreams and chimeras of painting,” while Pirro Ligorio expresses similar sentiments. In short, grotesques constituted a kind of laboratory of the artist’s imagination, combining, as Lomazzo attests, “natural fury and art.” In this connection, it is stunning to note how the patterns of grotesques find a close match in the display of botanical and biological objects in the Wunderkammern of the era. In Ferdinando Cospi’s collection in Bologna, illustrated in an engraving from 1677, the specimens are arranged in showcases beneath a decorative series of grotesques that seems to extend the museographic presentation in a fashion that blurs the distinction between the two categories; the artistic and the natural then are complementary and interchangeable.

The metamorphosis of nature into art and vice versa, given visual expression in grotesques, took form in countless ways. Especially spectacular—and notably early—are the bas-reliefs of the cloister of the Jerónimos (or Hieronymites) Monastery in Belém, Portugal, (1517–19), showing an imaginative array of grotesque motifs and monstrous apparitions. Another fine example, which conveys us back into the world of Hieronymus Bosch, can be seen in the decoration of Castello Tapparelli (Tapparelli Castle) in Lagnasco, near Saluzzo, created by Pietro Dolce (1560–66) with a combination of “antique-style” motifs and “monstrous” figures loosely inspired by Bosch’s inventions, but also by the medieval realm of Blemmyes or headless men, Panotti, and other fantastic beings, handed down in the marginalia—or illustrations in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. The grotesques in the Stanza della Fama (Hall of Fame) in Palazzo Vitelli in Sant’Egidio, Città di Castello, by Giovanni Antonio Paganino (circa 1574), nicely demonstrate the parodistic potential of this kind of decoration; these little figures, too, evoke the artistic culture of the lands north of the Alps. The grotesques at Trausnitz Castle (Burg Trausnitz) in Landshut (Bavaria), circa 1576, possibly designed by the Paduan-born Netherlandish painter Federico Sustris, reveal the buffoonish aspect of this class of imagery. Relatively little known are the wooden bas-reliefs adorning the retablo mayor, or main altarpiece of the church of San Benito el Real in Valladolid, by Alonso Berruguete, a Spanish “eccentric” painter and sculptor who, during his stay in Italy, was in contact with Rosso Fiorentino, among others; these works feature bizarre figures and diableries alongside classically inspired grotesque motifs. And this is hardly an isolated case: elsewhere in Spain, we find hybrid and grotesque figures among monumental Renaissance-style sculptural decorations; for instance, on the façade of the University of Salamanca. Grotesques directly attributable to Bosch’s inventions can be found on the margins of a group of tapestries executed by Frans Schavaert in Brussels (circa 1557–1560), depicting the Labors of Hercules. Recent research establishes that these tapestries were intended for various prominent members of the Spanish aristocracy, who were especially fascinated by Bosch’s world, as we shall see in the second section of the book. Ancient-style grotesques and the zoomorphic fantasies of “Geronimo Bosco,” as Bosch was known in Spanish; indeed, some Spanish scholars of the time, such as Sebastián de Covarrubias (author of a dictionary, El Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid, 1611), pointed out the unmistakable similarity between those two categories of images. In the same vein, Michel de Montaigne, who compared his own Essais (Essays) to “grotesques, which are odd, fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, assembling various parts, without any specific form, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?” The Portuguese artist and architect Francisco de Holanda was also pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of “certain fantasies” in painted decorations.

In this broad setting of variously eccentric and symbiotically bizarre forms and apparitions, “monstrous” human, animal, and vegetable aberrations drop in as well. These were considered mirabilia—as we have seen—wonders, freaks of nature, and therefore God’s own creations, all in all. Monsters engendered out of artists’ imaginations, then, stand as testament, in their turn, to the divine nature of the faculty of imagination. Such works deserve both the admiration and astonishment of the public. One well-known and spectacular instance is the Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93), whose portrait of Emperor Rudolf II in the guise of Vertumnus, god of gardens and orchards, was composed of fruit, flowers, and other naturalia (Skokloster Castle, Sweden), and appears as the image of a “monster,” though clearly with a positive connotation. The depiction allows for any number of meanings, especially political, but also with humorous nuances. Without delving into the issue of these various manifold interpretations, we may note that such a painting, with its detailed and opulent depictions of the many fruits of the earth, falls within the aesthetic of the Wunderkammer, every bit as much as do the works of Hieronymus Bosch. In these different images, the element of play is also evident, which could hardly be otherwise inasmuch as they are configured as products of the artists’ imaginations. It is no surprise that Bosch should have been widely described as pictor gryllorum, a Latin sobriquet that dates back to Pliny the Elder, who mentioned an artist named Antiphilus, best known for painting a ridiculous individual named Gryllus. Consequently, in the sixteenth century, such depictions were dubbed “grylli.” Similarly, in the Spanish collections the word used to refer to Bosch’s work was “disparates,” an adjective that perfectly captures its whimsical and “absurd” nature.

That playful dimension also makes itself felt in other instances, such as the architecture and decoration of certain Italian gardens, best known among them the Garden of Bomarzo, north of Rome (1552). Here, however, the playful and imaginative aspects, evoked in various inscriptions incised into the park’s sculptures (“You who wander through the world / Eager to see great wonders, / Come hither, where you will find fearsome images / Of elephants, lions, bears, whales and dragons”), took a decidedly pessimistic, even sorrowful turn when Duke Vicino Orsini, following the death of his wife, Giulia, in 1564, decided to alter the garden’s layout. The wildly extravagant sculptures of monsters, dragons, animals, and other creatures, carved from rocky terrain, suggest a competition of sorts between nature and art. These creatures sanction a freakish and highly learned journey of initiation into the “sacred grove” and on toward the underworld and afterlife, culminating in the grotesquely gaping maw of Hell: “Ogni pensiero vola,” reads the inscription carved there, perhaps derived from Dante: “all thoughts fly.” The motif of hell’s mouth refers back to a lengthy iconographic tradition linked to the depiction of the Last Judgment, but further developed by Bosch and his followers; indeed, the “spectacle” offered by the Bomarzo garden invites a particularly apt comparison with such other Bosch-inspired works as the panel painting of Christ’s Descent into Hell at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, reproduced here.

Christ's Descent into Hell (second quarter 16th century) by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue

In these “Bosch-like” images, the mouth of hell is set in vast and spectral nightscapes, peopled with wandering figures and illuminated by vast fires in the distance. There must surely have been paintings with similar themes in the shipment that the Veronese merchant and businessman Matteo del Nassaro brought back to Italy in 1535. That load contained no fewer than three hundred (!) “Flemish” paintings, one hundred twenty of which were later acquired by the Duke of Mantua. Among these, twenty showed “nothing other than villages on fire that seem to burn your hands if you draw nearer to touch them.” With such a presence of Boschian or similar works, it comes as no surprise that the motif of the mouth of hell should have been taken up on various occasions in Italian art in general, and not just at Bomarzo. For instance, we encounter it in an early sixteenth-century painting of uncertain attribution—probably a painter from Verona—Orpheus in the Underworld (location unknown), of clearly “Boschian” inspi- ration; we can also glimpse a reflection of it in the cave opening up behind St. Jerome in the youthful painting by Lorenzo Lotto at Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome (circa 1509). Also curious and note- worthy is the immense and monstrous infernal mouth painted by the workshop of Veronese painter Domenico Brusasorci in the church of San Marziale in Breonio, Valpolicella (circa 1520).

Generally speaking, the various princely and aristocratic courts of late sixteenth-century Italy are particularly conspicuous for their display of the imaginative, unrestrained, bizarre, and eccentric element in art. In Medici Florence, such artists as the architect and stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti, the painter and natural history illustrator Jacopo Ligozzi, the sculptor Niccolò Tribolo, the painters who decorated Francesco I’s studiolo, and slightly later, the sculptor Pietro Tacca, a student of the highly imaginative Giambologna, all produced works in this same vein. Notable examples include Tacca’s two bronze Fountains of the Sea Monsters in the piazza Santissima Annunziata in Florence (1629). Likewise, the various naturalistic and exotic artifacts and other objects housed in the extensive grand ducal collections also bear witness to a culture open to innovations as alternatives to the classical model. It is worth mentioning that these artistic manifestations came about in the Florence of Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari, proving after all that “classicism” was no fixed dogma, but at best a starting point from which to discover new forms with which to express fantasia and curiositas. Back to Boschian inventions. Their distinct lack of compositio in the Albertian sense finds a suggestive correspondence in the seemingly chaotic presentation of what was known as “macaronic literature,” commonly practiced in Northern Italy and elsewhere starting from the first half of the sixteenth century onward.One major figure in this context was Teofilo Folengo, better known as Merlin Cocai, an author and Benedictine monk born in Mantua, active in the Po Valley, and already mentioned in relation to Bosch in 1599 by the Spanish author José de Sigüenza. The Baldus by Folengo (1st ed., 1517) is a long serio-comic epic written in a language that merges Latin and Italian with various dialectal forms, culminating in a visit to a hell crowded with the spirits of poets, philosophers, and others. The work is characterized by its playfulness, eccentricity, and a fragmented if not altogether chaotic rendering of reality. Among the book’s first editions, some are illustrated with bizarre and “monstrous” images. Certain passages of Baldus evoke visions reminiscent of certain pseudo-Boschian paintings, such as Christ’s Descent into Hell mentioned above. See, for example, Canto 24, where Folengo describes how Baldus and his friends approach hell through a spectral landscape teeming with people. At a certain point, they find themselves in front of a wideopen door—always wide open, that is, for those who wish to enter but closed tight for all those who might want to leave.

Folengo’s exuberant evocations were hardly an exception in Italian literature during the first half of the sixteenth century and slightly thereafter. The writings of the so-called poligrafi, among them Ortensio Landi and the previously mentioned Anton Francesco Doni, active around the same time in Venice and surrounding areas, are characterized by their paradoxical descriptions, stories both comic and absurd, and linguistic virtuosity that take the form of veritable “labyrinths of words,” such as “registro delle chiachiere, frappe, chimere, gofferie, arguzie, filastroccole, castelli in aria, saviezze, aggiramenti, e lambicamenti di cervello; fanfalu- cole, sentenze, bugie, girelle, ghiribizzi, pappolate, capricci, frasch- erie, anfanamenti, viluppi, grilli, novelle, cicalerie, parabole, baie, proverbi, tresche, motti, umori et altre girandole e storie” (“registries of chitchat, fraps, chimeras, mockeries, witticisms, rhymes, castles in the air, wisdom, evasions, and brain twisters; fiddle-faddle, judgments, lies, twirls, whims, prattle, caprices, fooleries, tangles, whimsies, novelties, gossip, parables, wonders, proverbs, intrigues, witticisms, humors, and other whirligigs and stories”).

The impression imparted is one of “organized” chaos, reminiscent of Bosch’s presentations but also Rabelais’s renowned narrative strategies. Notably, a “pseudo-Rabelaisian” text titled Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (Paris 1565) is illustrated with a series of woodcuts depicting figures in the style of Bosch. The presence of these fantastic figures is explained by the combination of dreams (songes in French) and comic effects (drolatiques, like English “drollery”) highlighted in the title; the narrative however contains no references to impish monsters.

Folengo’s Baldus offers other extravagant “Boschian” descriptions, such as the following cavalcade ( fretolosa cohors) of monstrous creatures: “Nempe cavalcant quadrupedes ligni scannos tripedesque scanellos, fornari gramolas, descos misasque farinae, concas, telaros, conocchias, guindala, naspos, cadregas, cassas, cophinos, lettiria, scragnas, barrillos, secchias, gratarolas, mille novellas. Omnes ingentem faciunt per saxa tumultum, trentaque para sonant, dum tirant retro per umbras schiodatas tavolas, dum stringunt ilia buttis.” (“In fact, they are riding four-legged wooden chairs, three-legged stools, bakers’ kneaders, tables, breadboards, basins, looms, distaffs, skein winders, reels, armchairs, trunks, coffers, bed frames, benches, barrels, buckets, graters, a thousand novelties. Together they all make a huge din on the rocks and sound like thirty devils, while they drag behind broken tables through the shadows, squeezing their thighs on kegs.”)

It is likely that such seemingly playful and even absurd performances contain critical messages reformed in nature; that may be inferred from scattered statements of that nature everywhere in the works of Folengo, who belonged to the Cassinese Congregation of Santa Giustina, a notorious hotbed of heterodox thought during this period. Such ideas were especially cultivated in the Cassinese Monastery of Sant’Eufemia della Fonte in Brescia, where Folengo spent many years of his life. Brescia was, in general, a sort of crossroads for reformist currents from the North; it seems like no coincidence that the great Brescian painter Giovan Girolamo Savoldo (circa 1480–later than 1548)—married, by the way, to a Flemish woman—appears to be one of the most interesting Italian interpreters of Bosch. Here, a succession of further hypotheses and thoughts unfold that—let me repeat—will be further developed in this book.

We conjured up a vast and varied panorama of visual and literary manifestations, which present, this way or that, as alternatives to the classicizing norm that originated with Alberti and Vasari. This brings us to the (perhaps predictable) conclusion that such a norm, in a geographic and chronological overview of the setting of the Italian, Spanish, and European sixteenth century, was by no means universal. It only manifested itself where its need was felt, and in more or less adaptive fashions. Different artistic forms, which did not necessarily trace back to the pristine classical form, sprang from the fantasia and curiositas of artists and their public. What resulted was a new form of expression; understandably, many people in the sixteenth century were convinced they were living in a more “wondrous” era than anything before it. Now, the term “wonder” possessed many meanings, and we won’t delve into them here. Still, the connotation of “monstrous” was certainly one of them, as we can see in the popularizing writings of such doctors and philosophers as Girolamo Cardano and Giambattista della Porta, as well as in the phenomenon of the Kunstkammer, the work of artisans and artists like the French ceramicist Bernard Palissy, the paintings, prints, and tapestries by—or inspired by—Hieronymus Bosch and his followers, and the sculptures of Bomarzo and the Medici garden of Pratolino. All this is evidence that the issue of monsters, and deformity in general—namely, exceptions to the natural order—had become themes of focal interest among the elites of the time, an interest that could also be found outside the strict limits of academic and courtly environments, out in the larger world of art and craftsmanship. Under the signs of curiositas and varietas, we even see the image of Emperor Rudolf II transformed, through Arcimboldo’s interpretation, into a somewhat “monstrous” figure.

The context is significant: after all, the Habsburg emperor’s court in Prague was the last great laboratory of experimental, hybrid visual expression in the sense referenced here. One may very well argue that this multifaceted, if not outright fantastical procession of monstrosities and irregularities—some more bizarre, some less so—can only be partially attributed to the world created by Hieronymus Bosch. Quite true. But our point here—the point of this book—is something else. First, we should emphasize that, in any analysis of the diversity of expressive modes that makes up the quintessence of the “long sixteenth century”—that is, the Renaissance— the concept of fantasia provides an important interpretative key. That notion must not be confused with the present-day meaning of the word “fantasy”; in the sixteenth century, the term was more suggestive of the idea of invention or even just imagination. That concept was not always judged positively, and certainly not in all of its manifestations. The Roman poet Horace lambasted painters and poets who combined animal and human parts in their works, decrying it as something akin to the dreams of sick men. That harsh but authoritative judgment might also be applied to Bosch’s polymorphic inventions, and it undergirds the problematic reaction to the grotesques we mentioned in the previous chapter. Let us provide further illustrations of the point, with a somewhat dream-like vision of St. James and the magician Hermogenes, painted by a direct follower of Hieronymus Bosch (Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Other critics, in contrast, insisted on the “power of the soul” that they glimpsed in the wonderfully inventive combinatorial art of these figures, a power that they believed to be generated by fantasy. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino expressed that thought, and we can hardly overlook Leonardo da Vinci’s well-known fascination with monsters and dreamlike apparitions. Michelangelo, too, maintained a lifelong interest in composite inventions. In the context we’re examining, Michelangelo’s youthful copy of Martin Schongauer’s popular engraving of The Temptation of St. Anthony, a sort of compendium of monstrous figures, is significant. In the opinion of the Florentine master, novelties and sheer brilliance of invention were the distinguishing features of the quality of true art: they could be attained only under the impulse that, at this point, we might describe as the artist’s creative power and the very vehicle of his expressivity. In keeping with this line of thought, the Milanese theorist Gregorio Comanini (The Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting, 1591 [Il Figino, o Del Fine della Pittura]) praised Arcimboldo for employing his imaginative fantasy, or imagination, to create strange and whimsical extravagances never before seen. Arcimboldo’s inventions—we should note in passing—were also influential in the field of sculpture, as glimpsed in the extraordinary statue the Gardenkeeper (Custode dell’Orto), perhaps executed at the end of the sixteenth century by an anonymous artist, documented in 1664 in Monza in the collection of Count Antonio Aliprandi (Bergamo, private collection). Other figures, or perhaps we should say, other sculpted figurines “à la Arcimboldo,” made out of sea shells on a smaller scale, can be found in various museums from Spain to Italy (Madrid, National Archaeological Museum [Museo Arqueológico Nacional; MAN]; Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana); this is all virtually unexplored material awaiting in-depth study. From this versatile overview, finally, what emerges is not so much an “Anti-Renaissance,” but another Renaissance; a Renaissance that is multifaceted, colorful, and—and this is the aspect that especially interests us here—marked by inventive extravagance, fertile imagination, roguery, eccentricity, deviancy, the dimension of dreams, and pure artifice. This cultural orientation helps to explain the wide-ranging fascination with Hieronymus Bosch, whose art perfectly fits the conceptual categories of curiositas, varietas, and above all, fantasia. Moreover, we are convinced that the “Bosch brand” (meaning not only the autograph paintings of the Master of ‘s-Hertogenbosch but also the paintings and prints of his followers and imitators) played a non-secondary role—largely yet remaining to be discovered because so often indirect, (semi)hidden, and not easily identifiable—in the development of the “alternative Renaissance” in Southern Europe and—to a different extent—in the Habsburg-ruled countries of Central Europe. That is one of this book’s central propositions.

Bernard Aikema is Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Verona and an expert on artistic relations between European countries in modern times. Fernando Checa Cremades is an art historian and former director of the Prado Museum in Madrid.

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