Know the Artist_ Hieronymus Bosch

More than 500 years have passed since the death of early Netherlandish artist Euronymous Bosch, and his small oeuvre of some 30 known paintings and drawings still manages to completely beguile us. Given the mind-blowing detail with which he animated horrifying hellscapes and outlandish creatures, we have to wonder, who exactly was the man behind these fantastical images? This is Several Circles. Damned souls suffer their infernal fates at the hands, claws, and hooves of hybrid monsters. Humans emerge from various egg-like encasements, and most scenarios, frankly, defy explanation. Really, you could spend a lifetime locating and decoding the minute details packed into Euronymous Bosch's paintings. But it's Bosch's infamous hellscapes that have particularly captivated viewers through the centuries. Was he a heretic in direct communication with the devil? That one's been more or less debunked with time. Was he plagued by psychosis? Well, maybe, in a way. Some scholars have attributed his unparalleled originality to the hallucinatory side effects of a deadly disease known as St. Anthony's fire. Caused by the consumption of a fungus found on rye seeds, St. Anthony's fire wreaked gastrointestinal havoc, led to convulsions, gangrenous rot in the limbs, and vivid hallucinations. In fact, the fungus's psychedelic properties would be used to synthesize LSD in the early 20th century. So it's a distinct possibility that Bosch unknowingly consumed some poisonous rye bread and took to the proverbial canvas, though most of his paintings are actually oil on wood. But the understandably common picture that his work tends to provoke—one of a tortured and reclusive genius, toiling to record cautionary moral tales like some divinely appointed medium—is probably less accurate. From the nebulous narrative that's been pieced together, Bosch seemingly led a rather tame and comfortable life. Now, without any surviving diaries or letters to work with, few facts about Bosch are confirmed. His birth name appears in several forms, but from his real surname, Van Acken, historians have surmised that he came from an established family of painters. He probably received artistic training from his father or one of his father's brothers, three of whom were also artists, though none of their work exists today. His birth year, circa 1450, is an estimation based upon a portrait in which Bosch appears to be in his 60s. The portrait is from around 1516, the presumed year of the artist's death, which is how scholars have roughly calculated his lifespan. Furthermore, Bosch didn't date any of his paintings, which adds yet another layer of ambiguity to his timeline. We do know that he hailed from the Dutch town of Den Bosch, where he first appeared in a municipal record from 1474. We also know that he married a wealthy woman sometime around the year 1480, and that he enjoyed both career success and social respectability. Of course, these records bequeath nothing about who Bosch really was. His thoughts about art and what or who inspired such a radical body of work are mysteries left for us to merely speculate about. The artist is believed to have spent his whole life in the Den Bosch region, only straying as far as a neighboring town where his wife inherited a family house and land. A terrible fire tore through Den Bosch in 1463 when he was still a child, so the blazing infernos in his paintings may reference this traumatizing incident. Otherwise, Den Bosch was the prospering capital of a Dutch territory that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, so it's possible that Bosch was familiar with his Italian Renaissance-era contemporaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Boricelli. Closer to home in the so-called Low Countries, Flemish and Netherlandish painters including Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Petrus Christus established a northern renaissance of their own, also characterized by a significant move toward realism. Enter Bosch during this progressive time with a wildly enigmatic painting style that employs elements of renaissance realism, but exists worlds away from the practices of his peers. Bosch's early work exhibits some technical uncertainty and lacks the unbridled ingenuity of his mature paintings, but it's clear from the onset that he was an astute judge of character who found inspiration in Christian ethics, though whether he was personally guided by piousness is undetermined. As he leans into his proclivity for complex symbolism, his paintings become increasingly inventive sermons on human weakness and subsequent punishment. Of the few works definitively attributed to Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights is his most dizzying and downright mystifying masterpiece. Believed to have been commissioned by Count Hendrick III and painted between 1490 and 1510, this unconventional triptych presents a truly incomparable vision of paradise and perdition. If considered chronologically, the story begins with a grayscale painting of God creating the world. The oak panels then open to reveal three interior paintings, which are typically read as a linear narrative from left to right. God presents Adam to Eve amid an Arcadian landscape inhabited by birds, beasts, and sea creatures. Pandemonium ensues in the middle panel, where nude, unruly humans dominate the animals, canoodle in intimate pairs and cavort in rowdy groups, and overrun strange structures and vessels. Hell is a comparatively confounding, cacophonous nightmare of uniquely Boschian proportions. Because Bosch rarely signed his work, he may have left a clue of authorship in his sneaky self-portrait, just south of the knife-wielding ears. The theories about what Bosch was endeavoring to communicate here are both plentiful and inconclusive, to say the least. Despite the tragic fates of his faltering subjects, The Garden of Earthly Delights still feels weirdly celebratory. Bosch did belong to an elite religious order called the Brotherhood of Our Lady, which indicates at least some level of devoutness, and many of his other religious paintings are without the humorous profanity of his more secular magnum opus. So whether Bosch was a devoted Christian, a sardonic provocateur, or a bit of both is difficult to say. All the vagueness only elevates Bosch's mystique, but the far-reaching impact of his legacy is indisputable. He died an insignis pictor, or distinguished painter, whose patrons included members of the European nobility. After Bosch's death, King Philip II of Spain acquired The Garden of Earthly Delights, and it's said that he studied it vigorously as a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow. Bosch's idiosyncratic style naturally prompted several followers, the most famous of whom was Peter Bruegel the Elder, one of his generation's greatest painters. Four centuries later, the Surrealists would regard Bosch as an early progenitor. Today, his work remains an extensive influence on visual culture, permeating everything from high fashion to everyday wear, contemporary art, and beyond. Thanks for watching Several Circles. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos about the lives and work of extraordinary artists from across history and the present day.