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    Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
    Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
    Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
    Ebook360 pages2 hours

    Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?

    By Damon Knight

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    About this ebook

    Art history: An in-depth look at 1500's Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, notable for his fantastical and often heretical or macabre depictions of religious scenes. Bosch depicts, in the words of the art historian Walter Gibson, "a world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes." With over 100 color illustrations.

    Please Note:

    This is a "beta" edition of this book, because it is currently incomplete. Damon Knight published this book online in 2000 on fictionwise.com--and nowhere else. Damon passed away in 2002, and never produced a print or any other electronic edition. Fictionwise shut down many years ago, and apparently nobody kept a copy of this book, at least that we've been able to find. His family has nothing. The only copies that we've found so far are from the archive.org archive of it, which, while it had a copy of all the text, unfortunately did not include all of the images.

    It's possible the University of Oregon collection of Damon's papers has some copies of the missing images in printed drafts of the book, but we haven't yet been able to find out.

    If you have a copy (or can supply any missing images), please let us know!

    Until we can get a complete set of the images we are releasing this beta version, since it has all the text and most of the images. We've marked which images are missing, and most have captions so you know what the image refers to.

    Also, our apologies for the cost of the paperback, but we didn't feel a black&white book would do justice to all the color images Damon included; it is costly to produce full color books and this is priced at the minimum we can.

    If you join our mailing list we can notify you when we've built a complete copy. Meanwhile, enjoy Damon's last book!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherReAnimus Press
    Release dateMay 16, 2021
    ISBN9781005911928
    Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
    Author

    Damon Knight

    Damon Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, critic and fan. His forte was short stories and he is widely acknowledged as having been a master of the genre. He was a member of the Futurians, an early organization of the most prominent SF writers of the day. He founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA), the primary writers' organization for genre writers, as well as the Milford Writers workshop and co-founded the Clarion Writers Workshop. He edited the notable Orbit anthology series, and received the Hugo and SFWA Grand Master award. The award was later renamed in his honor. He was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm.More books from Damon Knight are available at: http://reanimus.com/authors/damonknight

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      Book preview

      Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up? - Damon Knight

      WILL THE REAL HIERONYMUS BOSCH PLEASE STAND UP?

      by

      DAMON KNIGHT

      Produced by ReAnimus Press

      Other books by Damon Knight:

      Creating Short Fiction

      The Futurians

      The Best of Damon Knight

      CV

      The Observers

      A Reasonable World

      In Search of Wonder

      The World and Thorinn

      Hell's Pavement

      Beyond the Barrier

      Masters of Evolution

      A for Anything

      The Sun Saboteurs

      The Rithian Terror

      Mind Switch

      The Man in the Tree

      Why Do Birds

      Humpty Dumpty: An Oval

      Far Out

      In Deep

      Off Center

      Turning On

      Three Novels

      World Without Children and The Earth Quarter

      Rule Golden and Other Stories

      Better Than One

      Late Knight Edition

      God's Nose

      One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

      Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction

      Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained

      Clarion Writers' Handbook

      Faking Out the Reader & It All Begins with Characters

      © 2021, 2000 by Damon Knight. All rights reserved.

      https://ReAnimus.com/store?author=Damon+Knight

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Publisher's Note

      Foreword

      Chapter 1 - The Double Renaissance

      Chapter 2 - Bosch

      Chapter 3 - The Marriage at Cana

      Chapter 4 - The Conjuror and the Fools

      Chapter 5 - The Flood

      Chapter 6 - Purgatory and Hell

      Chapter 7 - The Garden of Earthly Delights

      Chapter 8 - Tree Rings, Christ and the Loincloth

      Chapter 9 - The Adoration of the Magi

      Chapter 10 - Life and the Vagabond

      Chapter 11 - The Crowning with Thorns

      Chapter 12 - The Temptation of Saint Anthony

      Acknowledgments

      Bibliography

      About the Author

      Publisher’s Note

      This is a beta edition of this book, because it is currently incomplete. Damon Knight published this book online in 2000 on fictionwise.com—and nowhere else. Damon passed away in 2002, and never produced a print or any other electronic edition. Fictionwise shut down many years ago, and apparently nobody kept a copy of this book, at least that we’ve been able to find. His family has nothing. The only copies that we’ve found so far are from the archive.org archive of it, which, while it had a copy of all the text, unfortunately did not include all of the images.

      It’s possible the University of Oregon collection of Damon’s papers has some copies of the missing images in printed drafts of the book, but we haven’t yet been able to find out.

      If you have a copy (or can supply any missing images), please let us know!

      Until we can get a complete set of the images we are releasing this beta version, since it has all the text and most of the images. We’ve marked which images are missing, and most have captions so you know what the image refers to.

      If you join our mailing list we can notify you when we’ve built a complete copy. Meanwhile, enjoy Damon’s last book!

      Foreword

      THE ART of making what we now call puzzle pictures seems to have arisen around the middle of the fifteenth century. The first such picture that I know of is Bellini’s St. Jerome in the Wilderness, where faces can be made out in the stones of the saint’s retreat.

      Giovanni Bellini, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, mid-fifteenth century (detail). Florence, Uffizi.

      Piero di Cosimo made two pictures, The Misfortunes of Silenus and The Discovery of Honey, in which faces are hidden in the trunks of pollarded trees.

      Piero di Cosimo, Misfortunes of Silenus, c. 1505-10. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum.

      Piero di Cosimo, Discovery of Honey, c. 1505-20. Worcester, Massachusetts, Art Museum.

      Bellini’s and Piero’s puzzles were of the most primitive sort. (Find the hidden faces.) Bosch, who saw other possibilities, taught himself how to put layer upon layer of symbols and allusions into his paintings. We sense that they are there, even when we can’t read them, and it is this that gives his work its mesmerizing power.

      Bosch’s critics during the past seventy years have earnestly crammed the pictures into ill-fitting categories, rather like the Fathers of the Church explaining away the Old Testament. For the consistent failure of this method they have two excuses. The first is that Bosch meant his puzzle pictures to be understood only by members of some esoteric group—the Adamites, for instance (fifteenth-century nudists and free-lovers), the alchemists, the Cathars, or the Rosicrucians. The second excuse, which has the virtue of apple-cheeked simplicity, is that Bosch was a good Catholic and therefore there is nothing to explain.

      Some art historians argue in effect that everyone in Europe was a Roman Catholic in Bosch’s time, and therefore he must have been a Catholic too. The logic is impeccable, but the major premise is wrong—it isn’t true that everyone in Europe was a Catholic. Even leaving aside for a moment all the Moors, Jews, and pagans, thousands of Christians denied the authority of the Roman church and rejected its dogma. These people were called heretics (from Greek hairetikos, able to choose).

      In the thirteenth century one such group, the Cathars or Albigensians, grew so powerful in southern France that they were able to elect their own bishops. The Cathars believed, among other things, that water cannot be holy and cannot sanctify in baptism, that the Cross should not be venerated, for the same reason that one does not venerate a gallows, and that the rite of the Eucharist is a falsehood, because the wafer cannot contain Christ’s body (and if it could, people would have eaten it up long ago).

      The inquisitor Bernard Gui wrote, They [the Cathars] assert that the host comes from straw, that it passes through the tails of horses, to wit, when the flour is cleaned by a sieve [of horse hair]; that, moreover, it passes through the body and comes to a vile end, which, they say, could not happen if God were in it.¹

      With the help of northern nobles who were ready and willing to plunder the south, the Church destroyed the Cathars’ towns and fortresses and killed thousands in a seventy-year crusade, continued by the Inquisition well into the fourteenth century. The conflict was as much political as religious, and there were ignoble acts on both sides, but the result was to suppress the strongest branch of dissident Christianity, and to send a message to all other heretics that they had better keep their heads down.

      Lynda Harris, author of The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch, gives us many proofs that Bosch was a dualist, and goes on to argue that he must have been a Cathar, because Catharism was the only surviving dualist heresy in the fifteenth century. Like many historians, she seems to take it for granted that heresies are created ex nihilo by upstarts, but there is no evidence for this. It is far more likely that leaders such as Bogomil and Peter Valdes found converts ready to hand among people who saw all around them the evidence that the world was ruled by two gods, one good, one evil. Some beliefs are so attractive and so obvious (whether true or not) that they occur to many people spontaneously—for example the beliefs, shared today by thousands, that Elvis is alive and that the Moon landings of the sixties were studio fakes.

      Dualism in another form was built into Christianity almost from the beginning. The Docetists, a faction of the early Church, believed that Christ during his time on earth had only an apparent or phantom body. Some Gnostics believed in two Christs, one a pure spirit, the other a body of flesh.

      In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth the pure spirit is made to say, ... it was another ... who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over ... their error ... and I was laughing at their ignorance.²

      Many Christians believed Jesus had entered Mary’s ear, taken form, and emerged again the way he came in, thus preserving her virginity. But if Jesus was not born of woman in the ordinary way, it was easy to suppose that he never was made of flesh at all. This heresy in particular was a severe problem for the Roman church, because it was so persistent and kept cropping up in different forms. The Church could not allow Christianity to fall apart into a hundred different sects (more or less the situation we have today), and yet it could not convert the dissidents by sweet reason alone.

      It was in this late-medieval world and in the shadow of the Inquisition that Bosch struggled to make his way as an artist, and at the same time to avoid swallowing doctrines that were hateful to him. This conflict and others tormented him most of his life; it was only in his last decade that he found a brilliant method, three centuries before Poe’s The Purloined Letter, for hiding all his secrets in plain sight.

      Notes

      1. if God were in it. The Inquisitor’s Manual of Bernard Gui, translated in Readings in European History, ed. J.H. Robinson.

      2. laughing at their ignorance. Quoted by Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels, p. 87.

      Chapter 1 - The Double Renaissance

      Left, Leonardo, Mona Lisa, c. 1503-5. Paris, Louvre. Right, Robert Campin, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1430. London, National Gallery.

      THE TWO Renaissances, one in Italy and one in the North, are represented here by two portraits, one by Leonardo, who came late in the Southern Renaissance, and one by Robert Campin, who came at the beginning of the Northern. Leonardo’s painting, the most famous portrait in the world, is full of chiaroscuro, sfumato, and other Italian refinements. Campin’s, by contrast, is hard-edged and clean, almost photographic. Leonardo’s artistic heirs are Raphael, Rubens, and Titian, the painters of emotion; Campin’s are Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Jan Vermeer, the painters of what is.

      Bosch’s early work shows no trace of any influence of Campin and his group, but late in life, as we will see, he borrowed from an unknown Campin follower and from Campin’s pupil Rogier van der Weyden.

      Campin appeared in Tournai in 1406; we don’t know where he came from or where he had studied,

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