Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years,
we've been filming the biggest exhibitions in the world,
about some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only do we record these landmark shows,
but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes
of the galleries and museums concerned.
We then use the exhibition as a springboard
to take a broader look at these artists.
This week, we bring you an exhibition
that is genuinely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
To celebrate the 500th anniversary
of the death of the great Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch,
his home town of Den Bosch assembled
the largest exhibition of his paintings and drawings ever staged.
It was unprecedented, and so popular
that the gallery had to remain open until 1am every night.
Hieronymus Bosch was a remarkable artist.
A singular talent who continues to inspire artists today.
He was painting at the same time as Leonardo and Michelangelo,
but in the Italian-dominated world of Western art history,
he's never quite had their status.
However, his technical gifts are self-evidently remarkable
and his imaginative powers seemed unrestrained,
creating visions in oil paint that are overwhelmingly powerful,
sometimes bizarre, frightening, and beautiful,
and always deserving of a closer look.
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. Two, 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 drawings
of Jheronimus Bosch in his native town,
so we had to find a way to get the other museums prepared
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 Jheronimus Bosch.
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 the curators, uh,
whether they would co-operate 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 here.
And from the 20 drawings attributed to him,
we have 19 here in our exhibition,
so that's a tremendous success.
I think in asking for the loans, the museum were very clever
in that they made it clear that they wanted to bring
so many works back into the context in which they were created,
which always brings new insights into a work -
just seeing them also amassed together.
As one 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 catalogues.
This is the only moment where we have, let's say, two dozen works in one room.
We can make those sorts of comparisons
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?
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
NARRATOR: 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 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.
(GREGORIAN CHANT CONTINUES)
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.
's-Hertogenbosch at the time of Hieronymus Bosch
wasn't a very big city.
It was a city mainly of tradesmen.
But, of course, here 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 precise in his paintings.
He saw dogs. He saw horses passing by.
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.
Bosch was a religious man.
He was a layperson. 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.
I think it's very popularly 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 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 had been taught to believe by their church and by their society.
NARRATOR: 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 emphasise 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 Redemptor' -
'Christ Redeemer. Save us.'
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 emphasised
by his bloody footprint left on the ground.
In the early middle ages, the city of 's-Hertogenbosch
was full of cloisters, erm... 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 Liege
as a Marian-devotional fraternity -
the Illustrious Lady.
What we know about Hieronymus 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.
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.
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 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 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.
Bosch 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, how to think about life for yourself.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
If Hieronymus Bosch 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's known there was an organist in this building.
And we have lots of records 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 colour, and when you put more voices together,
it makes it even more complex and more ornate.
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.
Bosch was living in a time and in a city where fear was everywhere.
There was, of course, in that period,
the possibility of plagues and fires.
Poor harvests.
The fact that 's-Hertogenbosch 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 the Count of Nassau
and all those other important advisers from the Burgundian court
came to 's-Hertogenbosch
and had the opportunity to visit Bosch in his studio.
This dramatic triptych has been in Venice for over 350 years,
and represents the crucifixion of a female saint, Wilgefortis.
The left wing shows St 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 Wilgefortis 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.
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 gigabytes 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 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 original concept of this triptych was abandoned,
and the wings were painted over.
And it was changed into...
a scene that is very much Bosch.
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 Bosch very much.
It strikes me that the double-sided panels that Bosch 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... and is 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.
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.
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.
A 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 humour, and he must have enjoyed very much
painting all these hell scenes
and creating all these devilish monsters and creatures.
The power in the paintings of Bosch 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 paintings, thinking about the subject.
Bosch 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 Bosch wants.
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.
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 haywain, 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, uh, moralistic metaphors.
It's not the 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 is 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, and 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,
and 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 altar piece,
which would have been saints.
One begins with the left-hand side panel
and the 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 man.
You have all kinds of ominous, sort of, 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.
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, um, 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 and become smaller.
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 he would spend more time painting the figures,
but in fact he seems to be spending more time painting the animals.
Bosch is doing exactly, in the painting,
what man would have been struggling with, 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.
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.
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 very loud, in a way, and it evokes a lot of sound.
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 the palace of a nobleman,
that would be possible.
I think the securest way that we regard Bosch is being 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, you know, notions.
It's a sort of backwards-forwards movement
that everybody in the art historical world - the game is constantly being played.
So, I think in the way it strikes us as being modern.
Without fear. Fearless painting.
It's a David and Goliath situation.
Obviously with Bosch being David.
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 have 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? 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 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 that people keep coming back to
and they keep getting something from his paintings.
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