The spectacle depicted here is a devastating one:
devils and demons, spectres and other monstrous figures
attack the poor sinners to rack, torture and torment them in indescribably
grotesque ways. The instruments of torture that feature so prominently in
this hellish scenario, such as the bell and gigantic musical instruments,
are wholly unconventional. Pathetic sinners are woven alive into the
strings of an enormous harp, shut into a drum or shackled to a huge lute
to endure the beat of a diabolical symphony, a world-class apocalyptic
martyrdom. Despite the surreal world of madness and perversion that
unfolds like a nightmare in this painting, it is undeniably a masterpiece
of consummate elegance and perfection.
Never before or since has a painter succeeded in
creating a more symbolically perverse orgy of torture than
Hieronymus Bosch.
There could be no crasser contrast to the works of the Italian Renaissance
than this. The right panel of his triptych The Garden of Earthly
Delights, considered to be the Netherlandish painters masterpiece,
reveals nothing of human beauty. It intricately embroiders the hellish
sufferings to which man in his imperfection is condemned. Bosch's
imagination is inventive on an unprecedented and unparalleled scale. With
ghoulish wit, he delights in staging this inferno teeming with monstrous
atrocities. As overwhelmingly bizarre as all this may seem, Bosch's
imagination was, in fact, rooted in the reality of his times. People
groaned under the weight of increasing taxation. Crime and corruption were
rampant. Bishops, cardinals and Popes kept mistresses, fathered children
and even showed them to the public at Mass. Of monks it was said then that
they spent the day indulging in "flatulent discourse, dice games and
gluttony". It was commonplace that their "corruption stank to high
heaven".
Bosch's
contemporaries may indeed have recalled the words of the prophet Isaiah
(5: 11—12, 14): "Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that
they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame
them! And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in
their feasts: but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider
the operation of his hands.... Therefore hell hath enlarged herself and
opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude,
and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it." However,
the man who unleashed such unmitigated atrocities onto the canvas did not
fear Divine Judgement, at least not in the eyes of the Spanish satirist
Quevedo у Villegas (d. 1645), who had the painter engage in a fictive
dialogue in which he claimed not to believe in the devil or in hell.
