HIERONYMUS BOSCH'S MUSICAL HELL

HIERONYMUS BOSCH’S MUSICAL HELL et belli rabies et amor successit habendi. Virgil. Aeneid All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; Shakespeare. The Tempest The so-called ‘musical hell’ of The Garden of Earthly Delights is a hieroglyph whose conception, as we have seen in other visual wordplays by the painter from ’sHertogenbosch, combines a linguistic game with a bookish or popular culture reference that comes to extend or confirm the imagined word, that is, one transmuted into a pictorial image. Of the twelve musical instruments that appear in Hell, we are going to stick to the four located in the lower half of the right wing [fig. 1], whose singularity – as happens with the ‘flock of birds’ in the central panel [fig. 2] – is deduced from their inordinate size in relation to the human figures around them and their scenic grouping, which gives them a certain quartet nature: a lute, a harp, a hurdy-gurdy and a ‘shawm’1. Figure 1. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of instruments on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 2. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of birds on the central panel. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. The probable literary source of the scene as a whole is Daniel 3:5–7, both for its concrete meaning and for the presence of the aforementioned instruments, and of others that can also be found on the right wing of The Garden: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. (…) Therefore, as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp and all kinds of music, all the nations and 1 For the identification and designation of the musical instruments, we follow the article by A. ALONSO MARTÍNEZ, «Los instrumentos musicales en el Jardín de las delicias del Bosco», University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, 2014-2015. peoples of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up2. There are two aspects that should be highlighted in these verses from the Book of Daniel in relation to the Hell in The Garden. The first is the worship of a ‘golden statue’ which, linked to instrumental music, implies the violation of the divine commandment contained in Exodus 20:23: Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold 3. Such a precept appears enunciated in chapter 20 of Exodus, in which the Decalogue is collected, and it was precisely the one transgressed by the Israelites when building the famous ‘golden calf’. The second aspect is the modernized presence in The Garden of all the musical instruments mentioned in Daniel, with the exception of the psalterium4. The said musical instruments of Hell would be, then, but a symbol of the idolatry of gold, of the desire to possess, the only god actually venerated in this Old World, in contrast to that other, distant and new, of the central panel, inhabited by people living ‘without the deadly money’. This interpretation seems to be correct but, as we are going to see, it is not all that Bosch hides from us in his ‘musical hell’. We have referred above to a quartet made up of a group of instruments cited in the Book of Daniel, which Bosch, as we have said, has conveniently evolved to represent them according to the times: the fistula would correspond to what Ane Alonso Martínez identifies with a ‘shawm’, the cithara would be the ‘lute’, the sambuca, the ‘frame harp’, and the symphonia, the ‘hurdy-gurdy, also known as the organistrum’5. 2 The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%203&version=ESV). In the Latin version of the Vulgate: In hora, qua audieritis sonitum tubæ, et fistulæ, et citharæ, sambucæ, et psalterii, et symphoniæ, et universi generis musicorum, cadentes adorate statuam auream, quam constituit Nabuchodonosor rex. (…) Post hæc igitur statim ut audierunt omnes populi sonitum tubæ, fistulæ, et citharæ, sambucæ, et psalterii, et symphoniæ, et omnis generis musicorum cadentes omnes populi, tribus, et linguæ adoraverunt statuam auream, quam constituerat Nabuchodonosor rex. 3 Op. cit. (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020-23&version=NIV). In the Latin version of the Vulgate: non facietis mecum deos argenteos nec deos aureos facietis vobis. 4 The psalter appears in the The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, in the same tondo where a frame harp can be contemplated. 5 Op. cit. pp. 11, 9 y 10. The tuba could well correspond to the ‘curved horn’ or ‘animal horn’ [fig. 3]. The rest of the instruments that appear in the Hell of The Garden are the bagpipe, the triangle, the drum (or tambourine), the flute, the bastard trumpet, the lituus and the bell. Figure 3. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of curved horn on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Let us begin with the ‘shawm’ [fig. 4]. This instrument, in the whole of Bosch’s conserved work, only appears painted in The Garden of Earthly Delights. From the same instrumental family, there is also another very similar aerophone, with a double reed, a straight body with six finger holes and a flared bell that responds to the name of bombarde in Middle Dutch and also in Middle French, a word with which a large caliber artillery piece was designated as well. In fact, Bosch – as if he wanted to give us a clue – has turned the bell of his musical bombard into the smoking muzzle of its homonymous weapon, from which an ashen arm – cannon fodder – protrudes with his hand extended, wide open: unfading symbol of the horror of war [figs. 5 and 6]. Figure 4. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the bombard on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 5. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the bombard bell on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 6. Picasso, Guernica (1937), detail of the extended hand. Oil on canvas. Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía. As regards the frame harp, it is also represented, in addition to The Garden, on the central panel of the Triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony in Lisbon and, twice, in The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. The context of these three appearances in Bosch’s work – respectively demonic, angelic and lustful [figs. 7, 8 and 9] – not only does not provide any clue about its iconographic value, but also makes it possible to question whether Bosch attributed any symbolic meaning to this instrument. To further complicate matters, in the Fifth Book of Pantagruel the harp is placed in paradise: And I will be like a harp, Saved in joyous Paradise6. Figure 7. Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony, detail of the harp and a demon on the central panel. Oil on oak panel. Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Figure 8. Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, detail of the harp and an angel. Oil on poplar panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 9. Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, detail of the harp on the scene of lust. Oil on poplar panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. In fact, Bosch uses the harp to concoct a new wordplay, resorting in this case to the Latin term sambuca, which besides being a type of harp of Greek origin, also designates an ancient war machine used in the assault on walled cities. The man pierced by the harp strings, raising his arms to a sky of darkness [fig. 10], in a gesture that bears a resemblance to Christ crucified, is the image of suffering humanity, a victim of warlike madness as later depicted by Goya [fig. 11] and Picasso [fig. 12]. 6 In the original French version: Et je seray, comme une herpe/sauvé, en paradis gaillard. Figure 10. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of man pierced by the harp strings on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 11. Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1814), detail of the man with his arms raised. Oil on canvas. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 12. Picasso, Guernica (1937), detail of the figure with its arms raised. Oil on canvas. Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía. As with the harp, the settings in which Bosch uses the lute [fig. 13] do not clarify its meaning either: demonic, in the case of the Triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony, The Last Judgment in Vienna and in the Hell of The Flood Panels; loving, in The Haywain; and openly grotesque, in The Ship of Fools [fig. 14]. Figure 13. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the lute on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 14. Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools, detail of the lute. Oil on oak panel. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Here, the pun is formed by the homophony in Middle French between luth ‘lute’ and lutte ‘struggle, conflict, war’, an artifice that can also be obtained from Middle Dutch lute ‘lute’. The hurdy-gurdy [fig. 15] also appears on the central panel of the Triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony [fig. 16], in a hellish environment. In this case, the wordplay may be established between organistrum, a term composed from the Latin nouns organum and instrumentum, with which the hurdy-gurdy was also designated, and orgue, which in Middle French meant, in addition to ‘organ’, ‘ribauldequin’, a type of multiple-barrel artillery piece. Figure 15. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of the hurdy-gurdy on the right wing. Oil on oak panel. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Figure 16. Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony, detail of the hurdygurdy and the lute on the central panel. Oil on oak panel. Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. *** 1.- In the so-called ‘musical hell’, Bosch condensed a condemnation of war and man’s debasing gold, distinctive features of the Old World that, as one could deduce, by contrast, from the accounts of the American chroniclers, carried in themselves the denial of human happiness. Bosch, like Erasmus, reveals himself to us as a humanist faithful to an irenicism that seems to have neither nuances nor justifying exceptions. His utopianism, like Moro’s, is suspicious of the accumulation of wealth. 2.- In the ‘musical hell’ there is no answer to the question about the consideration that Bosch had of music as an art. The presence of the quartet in Hell responds to axial ideological and aesthetic criteria of Bosch’s painting, which, naturally, do not exclude a hypothetical admiration of the artist towards objects of singular beauty such as musical instruments. 3.- Just as there is no art without rules, there is no game without them. What we know to date about Bosch’s imagined word is that he used four different languages, namely Middle Dutch (his mother tongue), Middle French (the language of the ruling class of the Burgundian Netherlands), Latin (the language of the humanists and men of culture) and classical Greek, whose rudiments, at least, he knew. In his hieroglyphic art, which contemplates the possible combination of the mentioned languages, the progression towards the image from the word is carried out on the basis of criteria such as polysemy, homonymy and paronymy. Finally, the pictorial image reaches maturity when resting on a cultured or popular literary reference, which amplifies and/or clarifies its meaning. 4.- The hieroglyphs discovered in The Garden of Earthly Delights are found, in all cases, in beings or objects whose size in relation to the human scale is totally disproportionate, which invites us to think that Bosch intends, in this way, to attract the eye of the viewer to make him participate in his puzzle game. Note that on the left panel, in Paradise, nothing is disproportionate, which allows us to conjecture that there are no hieroglyphs on it. 5.- In The Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch unleashes a feverish concettism that reaches inconceivable limits in the saturation of meaning in certain scenes. We face a prodigious imagination that enjoys itself in a lush baroque style, whose aim is to amaze and mislead us. *** Luis Tejero González The Hague, October 2020