Famed Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch is perhaps the indisputable king of Hell. Not in the way that the Christian concept of ‘Satan’ is the king of Hell- but in the manner that demonstrates the fact that Bosch’s incredible, strange concoctions of hellish mind boggling beings, demons, worlds and landscapes is so seminally incomparable to anything else within his cultural context, that one cannot help but to stand in awe for many hours just in an attempt to comprehend his concoctions. The 1500s in The Netherlands was a time of great Catholic influence, with its severe and terrifying ideologies spanning the entire width and breadth of the cultural atmosphere.
It was the common ideas that each and every person had an all-consuming duty to behave with complete devotion to the Catholic faith- or else they would be damned and be forced to spend eternity in hell. The publication of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ around 200 years prior to the career of Bosch inspired a great shift in Christian art, allowing the addition of a more explicit and somewhat more ‘scare-tactic’ driven approach to Sin and punishment through the complex description of hell. Such ideas and concepts elevated their creative horrific detail- with catholic patronised artists doing their utmost best to display the horrors and shocks that their wealthy employers desired. The consequences of sin were made so awful to frighten the faithful obedience into people - and it was perhaps this absurdity that inspired Bosch.
The content and structure of Bosch’s work- perhaps more so than his style, is what makes it so distinctive. For instance- judging by Bosch’s relatively small portfolio, it appears that he favoured the physical frame of the ‘Triptych’ for his many allegorical and moral canvases (meaning a set of three individual paintings as part of a conglomerate whole). This structure allowed him to create scenes often involving some order of ‘the garden of Eden’, ‘the earthy plane’, ‘a garden of delight’, ‘purgatory’ and finally Hell. The first and the latter of this list often stayed constant- suggesting a contingent theory to Bosch’s reasoning of sin; its beginning and it’s end, while the central and largest canvas gave some indication of how one may get there or have acted as a consequence of The Fall. More intriguing, though, are Bosch’s creatures.
In his work we are lent hundreds of strange and otherworldly creatures that seem to stream in from every angle with an endless torrential feeling. While we may extrapolate that many of these creatures are purely mythological and drawn from literature or historical documents of his time (e.g. the hippogriff, the unicorn and the mermaid), many other creatures seem to be born from Bosch’s own imagination. His efforts are evidently the work of a man seeking to illicit the strongest response possible, not giving much precedence to the notions of realistic illustration or reference. The resultant effect of these animals is what we today may carelessly call ‘otherworldly’, in our own blissful awareness of artificial strangeness, TV, sci-fi and alien content.
Our exposure to illusions and augmented reality renders us inadequate to understand the significance of his work from the context for which it was truly intended. Bosch himself claims no true reference. To the targeted audience of 16th century Catholic nobles- these aliens represented something more than entertainment- they were more than just the way that we watch horror movies today; they were warnings and premonitions to remind that humanity was insignificant to the infinite powers and possibilities that their God had created.