THE HUNTED HUNTER

THE HUNTED HUNTER When analysing the so-called ‘gamblers’ hell’ we have mentioned Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff), a work in which, under the stigma of foolishness, a wide range of individual and collective behaviours of the European society in the late 15th century is compiled and condemned. Brant’s work, tinged with a deep pessimism and dotted with passages in apocalyptic tone, contrasts with that exuberant joie de vivre in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, of which the carnival mask of the tawny owl, behind which Bosch is hidden, as we have said, is an outstanding symbol. In vain we shall not search in Brant’s Ship for the utopian spirit that lies in works of later Christian humanism, nor for the linguistic ambivalences and puns that constitute its characteristic form of expression. In The Ship of Fools, black is black1. And yet it seems beyond any doubt that the main source of inspiration for Bosch’s panel entitled in modern times The Ship of Fools was the homonymous work by Sebastian Brant2. However, given the nature of ‘illustrated or pictorial literature’3 of the work by the Strasbourg humanist, it is worth asking what influenced Bosch the most, whether the extraordinary woodcuts that illustrate each chapter of Brant’s Ship, most of them attributed to Brant’s contemporary, the German painter and printer Albrech Dürer, or its text. Bosch’s purpose in the Hell of The Garden of Earthly Delights was nothing more than to paint the world as hell: the dreadful image of the Old World reflected in the limpid mirror of the New that can be seen on the central panel. In this sense, Brant’s The Ship of Fools formally offered Bosch an extensive guide on reprehensible vices, accompanied, at the same time, by a plastic translation. Among the blemishes worthy of being featured in the Hell of The Garden, Bosch included hunting – under the recognizable image of the hunted hunter – in the scene in which ‘giant rabbit now returns from the hunt with the hunter himself as his prey on a spit’4, a figure that, due to its layout on the right wing, seems to be an appendix to the ‘gamblers’ hell’ as well [fig. 1]. 1 Note that barely a year elapses between the date of publication in Basel of The Ship of Fools, ‘at the Shrovetide which one calls the Fool’s Festival in the year after Christ’s birth one thousand four hundred ninety-four’ and the date of the postscript – 14 March 1493 – of the so-called Columbus’s letter on the first voyage, announcing the discovery of the New World. When his Ship of Fools was published, however, Sebastian Brant was already vaguely aware of the existence of America – ‘They’ve found in Portugal since then/And in Hispania naked men,/And sparkling gold and islands too/Whereof no mortal ever knew.’ (S. BRANT, The Ship of Fools, Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1962, pp. 221-222) – perhaps through the Latin translation of Columbus’s letter printed ‘in Basel [in] 1493’ (C. SANZ, «La carta de Colón anunciando el descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo», Talleres Hauser y Menet, Madrid, 1956, p. 23), but not yet clearly conscious of the profound significance of this fact. 2 ‘The Middle Dutch version of the book [Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools], which Bosch must have used as his source, was published in 1497’, M. ILSINK y J. KOLDEWEIJ, op. cit., p. 20. 3 ‘literatura ilustrada o pictórica’, S. BRANT, La nave de los necios, Ed. Akal, 2011, p. 44. 4 L. SILVER, ‘Hieronymus Bosch, Tempter and Moralist’, https://percontra.net/archive/5silver4.htm. Figure 1. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the scene of the hunted hunter on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Before tracing the possible sources that Bosch may have used in the conception of this scene, it seems appropriate to study the way in which the artist metamorphosed the harmless prey into an infernal hunter. On the one hand, the ‘giant rabbit’ carries two hunting implements practically identical to those worn by one of the hunters in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565) [fig. 2], namely the gamebag and the hunting horn. The painter from ʼs-Hertogenbosch, however, has replaced the spear with a krauwel, a kind of kitchen hook with two or three curved teeth: an unmistakable attribute of the Boschian devils, as can be seen in Saint John on Patmos and in Death and the Miser. Let us note one more interesting detail: another of Brueghel’s hunters has caught a fox hanging from the spear by its hind legs and on his back, as is only natural. In contrast, the leporine devil – the hunted hunter himself – hangs in front, in what seems to us to be a forced position. Figure 2. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (1565), detail of the three hunters. Oil on oak panel. Viena, Kunsthistorisches Museum. In chapter 74 of Brant’s The Ship of Fools, entitled ‘Of useless hunting’, the condemnation of the art of hunting is based mainly, as in the ‘gamblers’ hell’, on the wastefulness it entails: Although it is meant for sport and pleasure/It’s sumptuous beyond all measure./The many kinds of dogs you need/Are quite expensive in their feed,/The dogs and hunting birds you’ve got/Have little use but cost a lot./No hare or partridge brought to ground/Will cost you less than one full pound5. The motifs of prodigality in hunting and gambling were two commonplace features of edifying literature that frequently appear together: [In] the Marquisate of Spendallezza (…) the inhabitants are the only spenders under the moone: they do nothing in the world, but invent how to spend with the best garbe: Some upon dogges, some upon haukes, or kites for a need: some upon a paire of ivorye cubes, or abunsh of speckled pastboards, and thus flie their patrimonies6. In fact, the chapter of Brant’s Ship in which gambling is censured – number 77, ‘Of gamblers’ – is not only very close to the chapter under discussion in the structural plan of the work, but the hand that illustrated both of them is the same, that of the so-called Secondary Master or Haintz-Nar-Meister7. It is there, in the engraving of chapter 74 [fig. 3], which was also used for chapter 18, that we believe the true source used by Bosch is to be found. Figure 3. Haintz-Nar-Meister, The Ship of Fools (1494), wood engraving of Chapter 74, ‘Of useless hunting’. Basel. The hunter in The Ship of Fools, like the Boschian devil, is blowing the hunting horn. But even more remarkable than this is the ambivalent tension to which Bosch’s infernal mutation subjects this figure: the hunter of the Secondary Master apparently becomes a prey like those he is chasing, that is, a hare (Lepus europaeus), but the ears of his hood, the ‘green and yellow hood with hare’s ears’8 of jesters and fools, are already hare-like. This harmony of opposites, which we shall also see later in the owl, the disturbing 5 S. BRANT, op. cit., pp. 246-247. J. HALL, The discovery of a new world or A description of the South Indies Hetherto unknowne by an English Mercury, Ed. Blount and W. Barrett, London, 1613 or 1614, p. 181. 7 S. BRANT, La nave de los necios, Ed. Akal, p. 56. Also in the ‘gamblers’ hell’ there seem to be coincidences – the jug carried by the woman with the naked torso and the huge die on her head – with the illustration of chapter 77. 8 ‘(…) chapperon verd et jausne a aureilles de lievre’, F. RABELAIS, The Third Book of Pantagruel. 6 identity, in this case, of victim and victimizer, becomes a reality, once again, in language: Facilitating the transition to the sense of being foolish, could have been haas [meaning hare], since this animal was a symbol of folly (cf. High German Hase = idiot, fool (…)9 We might suppose that Bosch here closes his criticism of hunting, but we would surely be wrong. We said above that the scene of the hunted hunter seems deliberately incorporated into the ‘gamblers’ hell’ as a kind of annexe; also that the prey of the diabolical hare hangs from the krauwel in an unnatural position. In fact, Bosch thus constructs a new hieroglyph with the eyes of the die – ogen – that the naked woman carries on her head and the hare’s enormous ears – oren – [fig. 4]. The position of these eyes and ears at the top of the scene as a whole is typical of the phylactery of a painting which may contain the words that appear in Matthew 13:13 and 16: This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. (…) But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.10 Figure 4. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the hare’s ears and the die on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. *** Luis Tejero González The Hague, February 2021 9 D. BAX, Hieronymus Bosch, his picture-writing deciphered, A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam, 1979, p. 251. https://biblehub.com/niv/matthew/13.htm. In the Latin version of the Vulgate: in parabolis loquor eis quia videntes non vident et audientes non audiunt neque intellegunt. (…) vestri autem beati oculi quia vident et aures vestræ quia audiunt. 10