The Triumph of the Saint
 

St James and the Magician

Much mythology surrounds the story of St James the Greater. Among these legends that of the magician Hermogenes was well known in the Middle Ages as reflecting the power of the Saint to counter magic with miracles. Briefly, the story goes that James was preaching and was approached by the Magician's assistant, who was sent to confound the Saint's teaching. But James converted the assistant. The Magician, justly infuriated, cast a spell on the assistant, who, in turn, appealed to St James to free him. This James did. The Magician then sent demons to torment James. Eventually, after much toing and froing, St James converted Hermogenes, who, in his turn, performed many miracles; a salutary story illustrating the power of the early saints. The medieval belief in the actuality of the demon world is demonstrated here by the convincing setting and costume, particularly of the enthroned Magician and of his apparently 'conversational' relationship with the demons. St James, with his angel and the retreating demons, can be seen on the upper left.

Triptych of the Temptation of St Anthony

It is likely that these little pictures of the saints were intended to be contemplated in the quiet of the cloister or private chapel. They present, in terms of the monastic ideal, the arduous path which the Christian pilgrim must climb to regain his lost homeland and achieve union with God. Nowhere, however, were the vicissitudes of the spiritual life more vividly and circumstantially detailed than in the legend of St Anthony the Hermit, founder of Christian monasticism, which Bosch painted on an altarpiece now preserved in Lisbon.
St Anthony is a recurrent figure in Bosch's work. In addition to the left wing of the »Hermit Saints« triptych, his figure appears several times on a drawing in the Louvre. A small panel in the Prado, showing the saint meditating in a sunny landscape, is also generally attributed to him although many details deviate from his usual style. Nevertheless, the Lisbon triptych remains his most comprehensive statement of the theme, the particulars of which he drew from the »Lives of the Fathers« and the »Golden Legend«, both of which were available in contemporary Dutch translations.
As we learn from these medieval compendia of saints' lives, St Anthony passed most of his long life (c. 251 -356) in the Egyptian desert, where his extraordinary piety made him an object of special attention for Satan. Once while praying in the shelter of an old tomb, Anthony was overwhelmed by a horde of devils who beat him so relentlessly that he was left for dead. After several fellow hermits had rescued and revived him, however, he returned to the tomb, where the devils caught him a second time and tossed him high into the air. This time his torments ended only when a Divine light illuminated the tomb and dispersed the devils. Satan then appeared in the guise of a beautiful and saintly queen whom Anthony encountered bathing in a river. Taking the hermit into her city, the Devil-Queen showed him all her supposed works of charity, and it was only when she sought to seduce the bedazzled Anthony that he recognized her true nature and intentions.
Two of these episodes are represented on the left inner wing of the Lisbon altarpiece. In the foreground, the unconscious Anthony is carried across a bridge by two companions dressed in the habit of the Antonite Order, accompanied by a secular figure who has been identified with some plausibility as a self-portrait of Bosch. Anthony appears again in the sky, borne aloft by demons, while other monsters buzz around him like angry insects. These scenes conform fairly closely to the written sources but as in so many other instances, Bosch enriched the original accounts with a wealth of inventive and dramatic detail. Three monsters confer beneath the bridge as an equally grotesque messenger skates towards them on the ice. A bird gulps down its newly hatched young at lower left. On the road ahead of Anthony and his companions, another group of demons approach a kneeling male figure whose body forms the roof and entrance of a brothel; a false beacon lures ships to their destruction in the sea beyond; and the shore is littered with corpses.
This powerful evocation of a corrupt and stinking world is no less apparent in the right wing, where Bosch used as his starting point the story of the Devil-Queen, a subject he had already depicted in the » Hermit Saints« altarpiece. The Devil-Queen appears in the river before Anthony, shielding her private parts with a false modesty and surrounded by her infernal court. Anthony averts his eyes from this obscene group only to be summoned by a demon-herald to the devilish feast in the foreground. The open-air table, the cloth slung tent-like over the tree stump beside the temptress, and the servants pouring wine seem like a grotesque parody of the traditional Garden of Love. In the background looms the city of the Devil-Queen, its demonic nature betrayed by the dragon swimming in the moat and by the flames erupting from the top of the main gate.
These diabolic enterprises reach a climax in the middle panel. Devils of all species, human and grotesque, arrive from all directions by land, water and air, to converge upon a ruined tomb in the centre. On a platform before the tomb, an elegantly dressed pair have set up a table from which they dispense drink to their companions. Near by, a woman wearing a large headdress and a gown with an extravagantly long train kneels at a parapet to offer a bowl to a figure opposite. Kneeling beside her, almost unnoticed in the midst of this hellish activity, is St Anthony himself; he turns towards the viewer, his right hand raised in blessing. His gesture is echoed by Christ halfhidden in the depths of the tomb, which Anthony has converted into a chapel. The right wall of the sanctuary ends in a decaying tower covered with monochrome scenes. Two of them, the Adoration of the Golden Calf and a group of men making offerings to an enthroned ape, are images of idolatry, while the third, the Israelites returning from Canaan with a bunch of grapes, prefigures Christ carrying the Cross on the outer wings of the triptych.
A burning village illuminates the dusky background, probably a reference to the disease of ergotism or »St Anthony's Fire«, whose victims invoked the name of St Anthony for relief. The ancient association of ergotism with the devil-plagued saint may have been influenced by the fact that one phase of the disease is characterized by hallucinations in which the sufferer believes that he is attacked by wild beasts or demons.
The devils who have gathered around St Anthony display a complexity of form unusual even for Bosch. In the group far right, for example, a blasted tree trunk becomes the bonnet, torso and arms of a woman whose body terminates in a scaly lizard tail; she holds a baby and is mounted on a giant rat. Near by, a jug has been transformed into another beast of burden whose wholly unsubstantial rider bears a thistle for a head. In the water below, a man has been absorbed into the interior of a gondola-fish, his hands thrust helplessly through its sides. An armoured demon with a horse's skull for a head plays a lute at lower left; he sits astride a plucked goose who wears shoes and whose neck ends in a sheep's muzzle. All these shifting forms, moreover, display a richness of colour that confers a visual beauty on even the most disgusting shape. A recent, careful cleaning of the triptych, among Bosch's best preserved works, reveals brilliant reds and greens alternating with subtly modulated passages of blue-greys and browns.
This convocation of fiends ostensibly illustrates the second attack on Anthony described in the literary accounts; the miraculous light which dispersed the devils on this occasion can be seen shining through one of the chapel windows. But the devils do not seem about to scatter »like dust in the wind«, as one version has it, nor are they physically attacking Anthony. Instead, their torments must be understood in a spiritual sense. Like the monstrous creatures who confront Deguilleville's pilgrim, they are incarnations of the sinful urges with which Anthony wrestled in his desert solitude. In a drawing made around 1500, Albrecht Durer similarly illustrated the evil thoughts of a group of people at Mass by means of little devils fluttering about their heads. Bax has identified a number of sins symbolized by Bosch's monsters, chief among which is Lust. Lust is also represented more overtly in the group of buildings at extreme right, where a monk and a prostitute drink together within a tent; there may be a further reference in the dark-skinned devil in the central group: the demon of unchastity, we are told, once appeared to Anthony in the form of a black boy. It should not be surprising that even the most ascetic saints were susceptible to this particular vice: as the »Malleus Maleficarum« informs us, it was through the carnal act that the Devil could most easily assail mankind.
Anthony, however, has overcome all his temptations through the strength of his faith. This faith is expressed in his gesture of benediction, thought to be particularly efficacious against the Devil; and the steady gaze which the hermit directs towards us is one of comforting assurance, as if he were saying, in the words attributed to him in the »Lives of the Fathers«: »though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.«(Psalms 27:3.) It is the same gaze which we have encountered in the face of Christ which looks out at us from the Madrid »Christ Carrying the Cross« and the London »Christ Crowned with Thorns«. When Anthony recognized the presence of Christ in the miraculous light, he cried out: »Where wert thou a while ago, 0 good Jesus? Why didst thou not come to me then, to succour me and heal my wounds?« To which Christ replied, »Anthony, I was here, but I wanted to see thee fight, and now that thou hast fought the good fight, I shall spread thy glory throughout the whole world.« While the wings of the Lisbon triptych show Anthony tempted and tormented, the central panel thus shows him triumphant.
This last-mentioned episode of the central panel casts light on a frequently misunderstood aspect of Bosch's art. In representing Anthony and other saints tormented and tempted by the Devil, Bosch did not reflect a Zoroastrian dualism, as some scholars have suggested. He did not view the world as a stage upon which was enacted the struggle between equally powerful forces of good and evil, for this would have denied the omnipotence of God. On the contrary, Bosch and his contemporaries knew that God permitted Satan to send tribulations to men for the good of their souls. God lets the Devil attack the saints, explains St Augustine, »sothat by outward temptation they may grow in grace.«(»City of God«, xx, 8.) In his voluntary submission to these troubles, the man of God achieves the most perfect imitation of Christ.
It is most appropriate, therefore, that Anthony's sufferings are echoed on the exterior of the same altarpiece in two grisaille scenes from Christ's Passion. On the left, soldiers overwhelm Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane as viciously as the devils attack Anthony on the reverse, while Judas hurriedly steals away with his thirty pieces of silver. In the other panel, Christ's collapse beneath the weight of his Cross has halted the procession to Golgotha, allowing St Veronica to wipe the sweat from the Saviour's face. The executioners can hardly restrain their impatience at this delay, and the bystanders look on more with idle curiosity than with sympathy. Below, the two thieves confess to hooded friars whose disreputable characters have been deftly portrayed.
The Lisbon triptych thus sums up the major themes we have encountered in the art of Bosch. The spectacle of sin and folly and the shifting horrors of Hell are joined to the images of the suffering Christ and of the saint firm in his faith against the assaults of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. To an age which believed in the reality of Satan and Hell, and in the imminent appearance of Antichrist with the Last Judgment not far behind, the serene countenance of St Anthony looking at us from his haunted chapel must have offered reassurance and hope.
Yet, even as Bosch painted the Lisbon triptych, men were questioning the values for which St Anthony stood, particularly the cloistered life spent in solitude away from one's fellow men. Erasmus and other humanists were already teaching that salvation could be achieved by living and working in this world, while in 1517, only one year after Bosch's death, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of a Wittenberg church and thereby initiated the events which completely disrupted the old order. Like Luther, Bosch frequently castigated the corruption of the clergy and the monks, but this was an old complaint and it is difficult to discern in his work any rejection of the medieval Church. His visual images were highly original; but they served to give a more vivid form to religious ideals and values which had sustained Christianity for centuries. In Bosch's art, the dying Middle Ages flared to a new brilliance before disappearing for ever.