The Last Judgement
 

The story recounted in the second and third chapters of Genesis has been placed in a lush garden; in the foreground we see the creation of Eve, followed by the temptation of the First Couple. In the middle distance they are driven from the garden by an angel. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is paralleled above by the expulsion from Heaven of the Rebel Angels, who are transformed into monsters as they descend to earth. Although the revolt of proud Lucifer and his followers is not mentioned in Genesis, it appears in Jewish legends and entered Christian doctrine at an early age. These were the angels who sinned and whose prince, envying Adam, caused him to sin in turn. It was further believed that Adam and Eve had been created by God in order that their offspring might fill the places left vacant by the fallen angels. In this panel, Bosch thus depicted the entrance of sin into the world and accounted for the necessity of the Last Judgment.
The inclusion of the Fall of Adam and Eve in a representation of the Last Judgment is unusual; the other two panels of the Vienna triptych depart even more from traditional iconography. Generally Heaven was allotted the chief role in the eschatological drama. As in the altarpiece by Roger van der Weyden, it is the act of judgment which is stressed; the judged are relegated to positions of secondary importance, and the felicity of the saved is described as fully as the pains of the lost. In Bosch's version, however, the divine court appears small and insignificant at the top of the central panel, and very few souls are numbered among the elect. The majority of mankind has been engulfed in the universal cataclysm which rages throughout the deep, murky landscape below.
This vast panoramic nightmare represents the earth in her final death throes, destroyed not by water as Durer and Leonardo were to envision it, but by the fire foretold in a thirteenth-century hymn, the sombre »Dies lrae«: »Day of Wrath, that day when the world dissolves in glowing ashes«. Bosch was probably also influenced by the account of the last days given in the Revelation of St John, a book which enjoyed renewed popularity in the late fifteenth century, when it was illustrated by Durer in his famous »Apocalypse« woodcuts of 1496-97. The wide valley dominating the central panel may represent the Valley of Jehoshaphat, which, on the basis of several Old Testament references (Joel 4:2,12), was traditionally thought to be the site of the Last Judgment, with the walls of the earthly Jerusalem blazing in the background. In any event, earth has become indistinguishable from Hell, depicted on the right wing, out of which the army of Satan swarms to attack the damned; the eternity of torment has begun.
The mystics claimed that the most grievous pain suffered by the damned in Hell was the knowledge that they were forever deprived of the sight of God. For most people, however, the torments of Hell were chiefly corporeal and so intense that, as one medieval sermon expresses it, the pains of this life will seem but a soothing ointment in comparison. For Bosch, too, the agony of Hell is mainly physical; the pale, naked bodies of the damned are mutilated, gnawed by serpents, consumed in fiery furnaces and imprisoned in diabolic engines of torture. The variety of torments seems infinite. In the central panel, one man is slowly roasted on a spit, basted by an ugly little creature with a bloated belly; nearby, a female demon has sliced up her victim into a frying pan, like a piece of ham, to accompany the eggs at her feet. An infernal concert appears in the right wing, conducted by a black-faced monster.
The Hell scene in the Prado »Tabletop« had paired off each punishment with one of the Deadly Sins; »there is no vice that will not receive its proper retribution«, says Thomas a Kempis, echoing a common belief of the time. Whether or not Bosch consistently followed this formula in the »Last Judgment« would be difficult to determine, although some of the punishments can be identified with specific sins. Thus, the avaricious are boiled in the great cauldron just visible beneath one of the buildings in the central panel. Around the corner, a fat glutton is forced to drink from a barrel held by two devils; the source of his dubious refreshment can be seen squatting in the window overhead. The lascivious woman on the roof above suffers the attentions of a lizard-like monster slithering across her loins, while being serenaded by two musical demons. On the cliffs to the right, across the river, blacksmith-devils hammer other victims on anvils, and one is being shod like a horse; these unfortunate souls are guilty of the sin of anger.
Some of these sins and their punishments can be identified from the inscriptions accompanying the Hell scene of the Prado »Tabletop«. Others occur in the traditional literary descriptions of Hell which flourished during the Middle Ages, generally in the form of visits to the nether regions by persons who returned to tell of their adventures. The best known of these »eyewitness« accounts is, of course, the »lnfemo« of Dante, which influenced generations of Italian artists.
Although Bosch followed none of these texts slavishly, he must have been familiar with them. Their influence can be seen not only in his rendering of specific punishments, but also in the general topography of his Hell, including such features as the burning pits and furnaces, and the lakes and rivers in which the damned are immersed. Some of his monsters are also derived from traditional literary and visual sources. The vaguely anthropomorphic devils, such as those in the blacksmith scene of the central panel, occur in many earlier Last Judgement scenes. Traditional, too, are the toads, adders and dragons which crawl over the rocks or gnaw at the vital parts of their victims.
Into this more or less conventional fauna of Hell, however, Bosch introduced new and more frightening species whose complex forms defy precise description. Many display bizarre fusions of animal and human elements, sometimes combined with inanimate objects. To this group belongs the bird-like monster who helps carry a giant knife in the centre panel; his torso develops into a fish tail and two humanoid legs, shod in a pair of jars. To the right an upturned basket darts forward on legs, a sword clutched in its mailed fist. Disembodied heads scuttle about on stubby limbs; others possess bodies and limbs which glow in the darkness. Several fiends blow musical instruments thrust into their hind quarters, bringing to mind the farting devil encountered by Dante («lnferno«, XXI, 139).
Not even the dragon which Leonardo da Vinci is reputed to have constructed in the last years of his life could have been as gruesome as Bosch's slithering horrors. And in the way their forms seem to change before our very eyes, Bosch effectively expresses the medieval conception of Hell as a state where the divinely ordained laws of nature have disintegrated into chaos.
In the final analysis, however, it is difficult for us to experience Bosch's Hell as did his contemporaries. Familiar with the conditions of the damned from the »Vision of Tundale« and similar literature, and from innumerable sermons, they would have felt, at least imaginatively, the alternation of extreme heat and cold, and they would have choked on the smoke and the fetid stench arising on every hand. They would have heard the screeching and hissing of the devils and, above all, the cries of the tormented. »Woe, woe, woe to us, the most sinful, wretched sons of Eve!« the damned wail in medieval sermons and books. Some of Bosch's victims clearly express their despair, as, for example, the screaming souls herded together beneath the tent in the right wing. Others, it is true, stare blankly before them, but it must not be assumed that they have become anaesthetized against pain. The Middle Ages thought otherwise. Not only did the agony of the damned persist at its highest intensity, but even the most horribly mutilated souls were perpetually made whole again, to commence their sufferings anew. And this process continued not for a time, but for all eternity.
The Vienna triptych shows the Last Judgment which embraces all men, an event which terminates all human history. In the »Vision of Tun-dale«, however, and in other sources which influenced Bosch, the torments of the damned are described as if happening in the present, in Purgatory, rather than at some unspecified time in the future. They reflect a belief in a particular judgment, a private reckoning to which each person must submit immediately upon his death; according to his merits, he was then dispatched to a place of torment or bliss, there to await the Last Judgment. Widespread during the later Middle Ages, this doctrine was treated by Denis the Carthusian in his »Dialogue on the Particular Judgment of God«, and, as Albert Chatelet* has shown, it inspired two panels by Dirk Bouts. These, in turn, were the model for four panels by Bosch, the so-called »Paradise« and »Hell« panels, preserved in the Palace of the Doges in Venice.

Terrestrial Paradise and Ascent of the Blessed
Palazzo Ducale, Venice

In this second Paradise panel the Blessed are being conducted to the presence of God. The course of the afterlife was a medieval preoccupation, and the panels elaborate the human condition from death either to Heaven or Hell. For the Blessed this meant the purgatorial introduction to the ascent to the godhead. In the most dramatic of the panels the chosen Blessed are being carried upwards by angels, ecstatically gazing into the great light bursting through the funnel into which they float. It is an image of great imaginative and inspirational power. It was believed that the panels were intended to form part of a triptych, but the current view is that they are linked panels.

Fall of the Damned and Hell
Palazzo Ducale, Venice

It has been assumed that these panels once formed the wings of a Last Judgment altarpiece; more probably, however, they were originally intended as independent works illustrating the rewards and pains of the Particular Judgment. The pictures have been disfigured by heavy overpainting and darkened varnish, and critics are not unanimous in attributing them to Bosch; nevertheless, it would be difficult to ascribe their compositions to anyone else. lnthe »Paradise« pair, the left-hand panel depicts the elect shepherded by angels into a rolling landscape from which rises the Fountain of Life; this is the Terrestrial Paradise, a sort of intermediate stage where the saved were cleansed of the last stain of sin before being admitted into the presence of God. Already one group of souls looks expectantly upwards. Several such gardens are described in the »Vision of Tundale«, and the Terrestrial Paradise, placed directly beneath Heaven, is shown in many mystery plays of the period. It was frequently identified with the Garden of Eden, thought to still exist on earth on some remote mountain inacessible to man, a belief which probably influenced the steep terrain to be seen in the Terrestrial Paradise as seen by Bouts and Bosch.
In his composition Bosch followed Bouts's »Terrestrial Paradise« fairly closely, departing from it in only one significant respect. Whereas Bouts depicted the actual entry of the saved into Heaven in the sky above, Bosch reserved this scene for a separate panel presenting a vision of celestial joy that was utterly beyond the powers of the more earthbound Bouts. Shedding the last vestige of their corporeality, the blessed souls float upwards through the night, scarcely supported by their angelic guides. They gaze with ecstatic yearning towards the great light which bursts through the darkness overhead. This funnel-shaped radiance, with its distinct segments, probably owes much to contemporary zodiacal diagrams, but in Bosch's hands it has become a shining corridor through which the blessed approach that final and perpetual union of the soul with God which is experienced on earth only in rare moments of spiritual exaltation. »Here the heart opens itself in joy and in desire«, Ruysbroeck tells us, »and all the veins gape, and all the powers of the soul are in readiness.« Suso describes how the tremulous, enraptured soul is conducted above the ninth heaven into the »coelum empyreum«, the flaming heaven, there to gaze at the immeasurable, all-pervading immovable, incorruptible brightness«, and to sink into the »infinite solitude and profound abyss« of the naked Godhead. With such poetic language the medieval mystic sought to express the Beatific Vision, but no artist before Bosch had clothed it with a visual form of comparable power.
The ascent of the blessed into the »coelum empyreum« is balanced in the third panel by the descent of the damned into the pit of Hell. Bosch followed Bouts's version of this subject, but once again he transformed the prosaic images of his model. The damned hurtle past in the darkness, seized upon by devils and scorched by Hellfire spitting through fissures in the rocks. In the final panel, Purgatory, a craggy mountain belches forth flames against a fiery sky, while the souls struggle helplessly in the water below. Not all the torments are physical: oblivious to the bat-winged devil tugging at him, one soul sits on the shore in a pensive attitude, seemingly overwhelmed by remorse. Hell, no less than Heaven, has been interpreted in the spiritual sense of the mystics.
In his use of light to express the most ineffable concepts of the Divine, Bosch approaches Geertgen tot Sint Jans and the great German masters of the early sixteenth century. In Geertgen's enchanting little »Madonna and Child« in Rotterdam, the tiny celestial musicians glow to incandescence in the ardour of their love for the Infant Christ. No less ecstatic are Albrecht Altdorfer's magically lighted »Nativity« of c. 1513 and the angelic jubilation in the Christmas panels of the Isenheim altarpiece, completed by Mathis Grunewald about the time of Bosch's death. In the succinctness and simplicity of their imagery, the two Venice »Hell« panels remain unique in Bosch's work. Elsewhere he portrayed the fauna of Hell in inexhaustible variety. In a group of drawings attributed to Bosch with reasonable certainty, monsters proliferate in a multitude of shapes, no two exactly alike.

Studies of Monsters
Pen and bistre, 318 x 210 mm
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Studies of Monsters
Pen and bistre, 318 x 210 mm
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford